Saturated fat: villain and bogeyman of cardiovascular disease? | Hacker News Reader

Saturated fat: villain and bogeyman of cardiovascular disease?

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32 pointsjbotz24 comments

I know that the Heart and Stroke Foundation (which I assume has good intentions) has long been telling people to avoid saturated fat and sodium, when it's not completely clear these are bad for all people (some can be sensitive to sodium for example). At some level it's probably not bad advice to limit intake of these things, but what ends up happening is that recommendations are for absurdly low levels (2400mg sodium/day eg) that make many people not bother even trying.

It's like telling people they need to get 150 minutes of exercise a week. How about starting by taking the stairs.

Anyway, I think it makes it even less credible when you see things like this that say it may not even be a problem. I believe focusing on things that are unambiguously good, and positive trumps trying to prohibit or restrict things that are cornerstones of many diets.

2.4g sodium is only "low" if you're eating a lot of processed foods

It really isn't that low

Right. I don't put NaCl on anything I eat except perhaps fries which I'd only have a few times a year yet I reckon I consume considerably more than 2.4g a day.

It's put in every conceivable thing we eat that we don't cook ourselves. Either we become obsessive home cooking fanatic or we exceed that limit.

Personally I track my nutrients with cronometer and I make 70% of my food from scratch by meal prepping and I don't add table salt to anything. If I don't use salt when seasoning my chicken my sodium intake is around 1g per day

Is it really considered obsessive to cook meals yourself? That sounds so bizarre to me

No it's not. But one has to be obsessive if one's to keep the salt below 2.4g and do so every day!

For me, cooking is a chore however I eat mostly at home. Two issues: almost everything other than vegetables has salt it, even packs of herbs. OK, I can run without condiments and herbs of any kind but it's damn boring. The other issue: you tell me how one can cook for a family and keep the food salt-free.

They wouldn't stand for it. Riot time, anyone?

Edit: the key issue here is lowering the consumption of salt across the whole population. You obviously like cooking and that's fine. But look at the stats, people not only in the US but all over the world are eating out more than ever, cafe culture seems to have taken over the world.

The moment you eat out you've lost control over the salt content.

I actually don't like cooking, I do it to save money and to control my nutrient intake. It takes about one to two hours per week to do meal prep which gives me lunch and dinner for the whole week. Breakfast is usually fruit and possibly some oatmeal and protein shake. Mostly whey with a little casein.

Veg, rice, and chicken barely have any sodium content naturally. Same with potatoes. Most unprocessed foods don't, it's only when you get to stuff that has preservatives that there's a bunch of sodium like the other commenter mentioned. If you buy it in a package, if it has a long shelf life (longer than a few days to a week or so) then it is likely highly processed and contains preservatives.

You don't have to keep food salt free when you cook unprocessed foods, you can season with salt.

Have you actually looked at the nutrient content for unprocessed foods?

I've looked into it a bit and my understanding is that added salt, like on fries, is almost irrelevant, in that a little salt goes a long way and salty fries still only have a comparatively low amount of sodium. On the other hand, commercial baked goods, like bread or buns, have an insane amount of sodium that you barely taste. A hotdog bun often has as much or more sodium as the hotdog.

One slice of bread I've seen had 420mg sodium. That's insane

As crazy as it sounds 2.5hr of exercise per week is not a crazy expectation to care for one’s health.

As someone who exceeds this apparent low bar, I only do it because I’m highly motivated to care for my pup. Before I had her, I had a lot of difficulty motivating myself to be more active than was basically necessary. Don’t get me wrong, 2.5 hours of physical activity per week feels low to me now, I even expect I’ll go stir crazy as my opportunities to enjoyably get that activity outdoors is waning with the season change. But 35 years of a mostly sedentary life was not an easy thing to course change, and even my most successful endeavors weren’t as resilient as idle defaults I had as a child. And I know plenty of people whose early life inertia was far less active than my own.

2.5 hours of exercise a week is about 1.5 miles walking at a pace that raises your heart rate every day. Doesn’t sound like much, if you’re doing it, but sounds like a lot if you’re not moving much. And it sounds like a lot more if you’re stressed about or cramped for time.

I’m trying to strike a balance here where I know the benefits and I also know the challenge of embracing them. For people who want to be more active and would benefit from external motivation, but don't feel ready for major permanent life commitment changes, I highly recommend offering to watch after someone else’s child or dog for a limited time… or even their house plants, if you can walk over to water them. Assuming you feel you can rise to the occasion. You’ll be active because you have to, you’ll likely find it very rewarding in its own right, and you’ll have built a temporary routine around the activity that’s less focused on motivating you and more comfortable because of that.

FDA RDIs are useful as an average guideline imo, while individual acceptable limits can vary. 2300 mg/day (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...) Sodium is not that hard to exceed when consuming processed foods:

1. One serving of TGI Friday fries is 33% of daily sodium intake: https://www.famnom.com/my_food/8eaaea4d-e97d-4a38-8125-4b923...

2. One cheese pizza slice is 28%: https://www.famnom.com/my_food/485759ea-8507-4af7-9efe-bf61b...

Eat food, not too much, mostly unprocessed foods.

There's also a shallow aspect in quantitative only messages. Your body is complex and soft, move more but move smart, move soft, breath deep, pay attention. Move in groups, focus on energy efficiency. Your cardio vascular system is a bit of a plumbing.. so lay flat at times to move the blood more easily. Yoga people also aim at matching breathing oxygen intake, lung sucking blood to improve the overall blood flow efficiency. This kind of approaches should be more efficient than just zumba hard at the gym club.

Just from my own anecdotal evidence, going clean vegan dropped my cholesterol levels from 6.1 to 5.1 in ~3 months. I’m pretty convinced there is a lot of truth to high saturated fat/animal products negatively impacting cholesterol levels. But that is my own personal experience.

I’d encourage anyone seeking insights to just try a vegan diet for a while and compare their bloodwork, and how they feel. Seems like little point looking for answers in the science because of the amount of noise.

but that vegan diet will likely raise triglycerides...

As I said before I’ll keep repeating, it’s all about genetics. When I was vegan my VLDL was very high and my HDL was consistently below 35. When I went to a pescatarian diet with no plant oils is the only time my HDL is consistently above 50 and my VLDL dropped. I also have a history of early heart disease in my family.

I would not suggesting a diet to anyone if they do not know their genetics.

Did you try going clean non-vegan before that?

Bogeyman: "Based on the scientific evidence, there is no scientific ground to demonize SFA as a cause of CVD. SFA naturally occurring in nutrient-dense foods can be safely included in the diet."

After we vanquish the bogeyman, SFA can be revealed as a health food.

https://med.umn.edu/news-events/new-research-finds-saturated...

In my opinion, calling a food or nutrient "healthy" hides the nuance. Nothing is inherently healthy.

The levels and forms that we consume the nutrients in could be considered healthy

There's a podcast interview you should listen to where Peter Attia interviews Gerald Shulman (MD, PhD) about the mechanisms underlying diabetes. Shulman clearly implicates excessive intramyocellular lipids (which diets high in saturated fat increase) as the culprit, and Attia, former keto zealot, does basically nothing to dispute this, presumably because he can't. It's pretty damning for the low-carb dogma, which I confess to having been at least somewhat taken in by:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291812/

(I never did keto or paleo, but I did harbor an irrational fear of carbs years. Today I still eat animal products in moderation, but I absolutely try to keep it as low in SFA as I can.)

That crook Ancel Keys - he's behind so much chronic diseases and obesity - all to please political agendas - he himself didn't stop eating beef after his "research" or better yet - deliberate scientific fraud! I can't believe people still buy nonfat and low-fat milk!

Collectively, neither observational studies, prospective epidemiologic cohort studies, RCTs, systematic reviews and meta analyses have conclusively established a significant association between SFA in the diet and subsequent cardiovascular risk and CAD, MI or mortality nor a benefit of reducing dietary SFAs on CVD rick, events and mortality. Beneficial effects of replacement of SFA by polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fat or carbohydrates remain elusive.

Normie speak; they don't know.

Next....

> they don't know

Like in what looks like every other case of diet science.

People are finally questioning and replicating that kind of research. The mainstream culture of the field seems to have been bad at that on the past, but it changed. Maybe soon we will actually know something.

Diet science is flawed because it does not take personal genetics into account. You can take two different sample sizes, say one from a largely Inuit population and another from a Caucasian farmer population and get two different results when changing their diet.

Yep, it is very hard for a lot of reasons. The correct way to deal with this is to acknowledge the problem and your research's limitations. The wrong way to deal with this is to pretend the problem doesn't exist. A lot of the latter seem to have happened on the past; not always by the original authors, but by the community as a whole.

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