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Comment by tpush | Hacker News Reader

If the diet is high in (processed) red meat: higher cancer risk. If the diet is (too) high in saturated fat, increased cardio vascular risk.

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> If the diet is (too) high in saturated fat, increased cardio vascular risk.

You may want to take a look at this meta-study [0].

> “A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.”

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071648/

The authors of that meta-analysis adjusted for serum cholesterol, which defeats the entire point. Saturated fat intake above a certain threshold is associated with CVD because it causes an uptake in serum cholesterol, eventually leading to atherosclerosis.

Saying saturated fat intake doesn't correlate with CVD when ignoring serum cholesterol is entirely uninteresting, and not what anyone's claiming.

See also this[0] comment on that flawed meta-analysis.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/92/2/458/4597393

Meta-analyses are not a panacea, that's clear. As I suspect you know well, two further meta-analysis came to the same conclusion: Chowdhury 2014 [0], De Souza 2015 [1]. More recently, Kang in 2018 [2] and Zhu in 2019 are also stating that they fail to find evidence of a clear association between SFA consumption and risk of CVD.

Obviously, as science is what it is (and that's a good thing), those study are debatable and do have weak spots.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24723079/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26268692/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31791641/ [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30954077/

Why are you relying on meta-analysis of observational studies when we have meta-analysis of RCT's?

I’m all ear actually, if you could kindly point me to the relevant material.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

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