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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how there's a major shift in the knowledge about risks of things like sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. And it usually turns out there was an industry group involved in sort of a coverup. The lesson here is to take any health claims or dismissal or risks with a grain of salt when there's a big industry behind it.

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Indeed, an NIH funded longitudinal study on alcohol kicked off in 2014 and it was shut down for being tainted by industry money: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/health/alcohol-nih-drinki... - you can't necessarily even trust publicly funded science when it impacts large industries.

It's at least encouraging that it was caught and shut down.

One of my favorite examples of this is how coconut oil is advertised all over youtube by thousands of influencers as a superfood that must be a part of a healthy diet.

(Especially since it's hardly an oil in my opinion -- it's partially solid at room temperature)

There's absolutely no reliable evidence that coconut oil has any beneficial effects on the human body, and I really don't see why anybody would believe that an oil high in saturated fats is good for you.

Same goes for agave syrup and other health fads.

There's a ton of alternative kinds of sugar that are marketed as healthier than sugar but are in fact just sugar extracted from a different plant or other source. Sugar is sugar.

Sugar is sugar but fructose does seem to be particularly hard on humans.

Just more horseshit from Big Coconut, that's what I think.

Those coconuts have definitely got blood on their hands:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut

Because there is ample evidence that saturated fats are not bad for you, or at least no where near as bad as previous science led us to believe.

It would be more accurate to say that there is no strong evidence that saturated fats are bad for you.

Lots of the previous science was bad science that did not account for confounding factors, such as not taking into account that lots of fast food has lots of saturated fats(and made up for a large portion of saturated fat consumption) and adjusting for that. ie the difference between "do sat fats make people unhealthy" and "does eating fast food(which happens to have sat fats) make people unhealthy"

If you want to go down the rabbit hole, there is also no strong evidence showing cholesterol/eggs are bad, and neither is there any evidence showing salt is bad(if you are healthy). Lots of nutrition studies have such laughably silly methodology. Not sure why they were ever taken seriously.

You raise several nutritional theories here.

Dietary Cholesterol / Blood Cholesterol - cholesterol restriction has been removed from dietary guidelines in the US, so people have taken that seriously.

Increased saturated fat is pretty well associated with LDL levels, which is associated with cardiovascular disease risk. Not sure that I've ever seen any contrary studies recently - I would be interested if you could link any you are aware of... I guess the questions I have seen are around carb intake and fat intake, but that's kind of a separate issue

Salt is definitely more questionable, but seems like if you are avoiding hyperprocessed foods, you are going to intake less salt, so maybe a non-issue...

Well for fats we have this:

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

There seems to be a moderate reduction in cardiovascular events, BUT - there is NO CHANGE in mortality or even cardiac mortality. Also note, these studies may be victim to the saturated-fats-are-fast-food issue.

If saturated fats were actually bad, like smoking is, I think we would see more significant results than "10-15% decrease in events that doesn't even change peoples' overall outcomes".

I'm not saying you should avoid coconut oil, I just think it's a very questionable claim that cooking with coconut oil instead of other plant based oils like canola oil is going to improve your health in any way.

I suspect that high fats are fine and high carbs are fine, but having both high fats + high carbs leads to health problems. Fat heavy leads to keto metabolic state, heavy carbs lead to the other metabolic state. Having both at the same time is the issue, my opinion.

> I really don't see why anybody would believe that an oil high in saturated fats is good for you.

A lot of people do if you look around. Serious people I mean. They usually sing the praises of butter (and ghee), but the same reasoning is applied now to coconut oil.

> major shift in the knowledge about risks of things like sugar, cigarettes, alcohol...

In each of these case, the medical and scientific community didn't have a vested interests in these entities. I mean, the medical community didn't come up with smoking or alcohol consumption...

Now imagine some entity or procedure that the medical/scientific community came up with and the big business found way to make huge money off of, such that there is a natural alignment of incentives for the scientific community and big business to keep this thing propped up. Such a thing, even if doing great harm, is sure to go on for a vastly longer period of time, if not perpetually....

Of course you'd say that. You clearly work for the salt lobby! In all seriousness though, who stands to benefit from this? In the case of sugar, doctors wanted to suggest limiting it, but lobbyists pushed for the advocation of limiting fat intake instead (which was thought to be just as unhealthy at the time). Sugar was a clear substitute because removing fat makes things taste like, well, cardboard. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any substitutes for tobacco products or alcohol. Recreational services, maybe? Even Bowling alleys typically have bars.

> The lesson here is

Do not allow victimless crime to exist. And big biz lobby efforts should be illegal.

I always scoffed at people who believed "a glass of wine every night is good for you." It seems pretty obvious that ingesting literal poison every day is not good for you.

Protein is a literal poison as well if you consume excessive amounts (above 35-40% of all caloric intake).

It can also be infectious, in the case of prions.

Ban all protein!

Here's an experiment: take two bugs. Pour alcohol on one and a protein shake on another. Which one do you think will be more biologically destructive?

Calming your nerves lowers your heart rate. Lower heart rate leads to less heart problems. Less heart problems leads to longer life.

A glass of wine calms your nerves.

Alcohol increases your heart rate.

Interesting, I hadn't known that: https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases...

Separately, consider that your assertion would likely be more persuasive to doubters if you'd included a link defending it.

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