Honey consumption improves blood sugar and cholesterol levels, study suggests | Hacker News Reader

Honey consumption improves blood sugar and cholesterol levels, study suggests

sci.news

257 pointsWaitWaitWha197 comments

> This systematic review and meta-analysis showed that oral honey intake reduced fasting glucose, total cholesterol, LDL-C, fasting triglycerides, and ALT and increased HDL-C, IL-6, and TNF-α

I was surprised to find out that the average glycemic index of honey is about 55, much lower than I had anticipated. Even so, I still find it counter intuitive that honey — majority sugar — can lower your fasting glucose.

I wonder if they're displacing other sugars with Honey. Speaking as a diabetic I find it very hard to believe that a spoonful of Honey in the morning is going to improve my day :)

Indeed: “We’re not saying you should start having honey if you currently avoid sugar,” Dr. Khan added.

“The takeaway is more about replacement — if you’re using table sugar, syrup or another sweetener, switching those sugars for honey might lower cardiometabolic risks.”

This is my recommendation on diet soda to people as well. The literature points to diet soda being a productive replacement for those currently drinking soda and desiring to lose weight.

But the jury is still out on potential effects of diet on the microbiome and insulin sensitivity etc, so I wouldn't go encouraging people to pick it up for no reason.

My intuition is that the non-sugar components of honey are responsible.

What might those be?

It seems that the species of bee and pollen source make a big difference in the consistency and flavor of honey. It would be interesting to know which types of honey are highest in the healthy compounds and lowest in unhealthiest compounds (presumably sugar).

notably honey made from mountain laurel ('Mad Honey') can be hazardous to your health, since every part of the plant is toxic.

Unless you risk killing yourself by doing so, you should try and see what happens.

I prefer honey over everything else. It's the smoothest form of sugar I've experienced and it's way more than just a source of sugar, too.

I believe this kind of study will shed more light on how much more we have to learn about nutrition and how our body processes and metabolizes nutrients.

I think a lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars such as what's found in fruits and honey.

This and many other studies have shown that this parity between input/output is not what happens nor is it an adequate reflection of how our body works. Treating the body as a simple machine in this manner is very naïve and has lead, in my opinion, to a huge amount of misapplied health advice or just outright wrong policies.

Of course, the factors driving this have profited handsomely from this misdirection, but that's another angle suitable for it's own thread.

Not so recently the similarly shocking findings about the Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat also contradicted the common beliefs regarding the saturated fats. If I may be allowed to speculate, I think it could simply have a lot to do with the very basic idea of consuming processed vs natural foods. So refined sugar = bad, refined fats = bad. Our bodies have evolved to optimize digestion and make most of those natural ingredients, but not the artificial, industrial products we had been exposed for mere 150-200 years.

EDIT: for more background, what was stunning is that some cuisines in Mediterranean, like Spanish or North Italian, can be quite heavy on meat, yet that did not negatively correlate with the lifespan, compared to more lightweight variates in the region. I can’t recall the paperwork, but that was the general gist.

I guess "refined" should be probably understood as "many ingredients, seemingly important but unknown to actual medicine, filtered out"...

Can you share more? The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear, and there are usually good responses to find around single studies that purport to show countervailing evidence.

The biggest example of this is that it’s hard to find a cohort that contains substantially different levels of saturated fat intake (very low vs very high). So the quintiles inside the same cohort don’t necessarily have significant outcome differences, and that’s peddled as saturated fat not being bad for you.

Saturated fat is definitely not as bad as things like partially hydrogenated fats, and likely not as bad as some other highly-processed fats.

Does anyone else remember "heart healthy" margarine from the 90s that was certainly worse for you cardiovascular system than lard?

Anyway, studies regarding saturated fat are contradictory and inconclusive:

From 2022:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/saturated-fat

From 2014:

https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/truth-...

Statements that seem to be true:

- You should avoid trans fats

- Replacing fats with carbs + sugar is a bad idea.

- Going on a low fat diet, or a low saturated fat diet usually results in eating more carbs and sugar.

Every guidance I've read for almost a decade has said saturated fat, including from animals, was falsely vilified and when consumed as part of a whole food is perfectly healthy up to half of your caloric intake. And that polyunsaturated fats are extraordinarily unhealthy even when not modified into transfats. The only holdouts I've seen reference American heart association which does still give the guidance you suggest.

I do see triglycerides alternately blaimed on fats or carbs. My best bloodwork came when I spentonths having 1.5lbs of grassfed beef ever day with leaves and roots. My worst was when my triglycerides spiked on a carb heavy diet after soylent swapped brown rice protein for more carbs towards the end of the Kickstarter.

> "The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear,"

Copying from a comment I made 3 months ago[2]; Dr Paul Mason on "Saturated Fat is not Dangerous"[1] talks about the introduction of the "lower saturated fat" guidelines in Australia and how it was not based on any evidence or medical literature review. He mentions three meta-analyses on saturated fats:

"Insufficient evidence of association is present for intake of ... saturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids; total fat ... meat, eggs and milk" - Mente A, et al. A systematic review of the evidence supporting a causal link between dietary factors and coronary heart disease. Arch Intern Med. 2009 April 13.

"... no significant evidence for conclusing that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD" - Siri-Tarino PW, et al. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Mar.

"There were no clear effects of dietary fat changes on total mortality or cardiovascular mortality..." - Hooper L, et al. Reduced or modified dietary fat for preventing cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2011 Jul 6.

And he says "the balance of evidence available at the time of developing our nutritional guidelines says that saturated fat in the diet is not associated with any deleterious health outcomes, that is, it's safe".

Newer research published after 2013, same results, he cites three more reviews and meta-analyses, two from the British Medical Journal.

Then he mentions the biggest most expensive study done on reducing dietary fat, $700,000,000 dollars, 50,000 people, 8 years, and the only statistically significant result from the study was that women with a history of heart disease who were randomly selected into the lower fat group, increased their risk of problems such as heart attacks by 26%.

That is, saturated fat (animal fat tends to be) hasn't been proven to do anything bad, and reduced fat (vegetarianism tends to be , but not necessarily) hasn't been proven to do anything beneficial.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUY_SDhxf4k

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966148

> Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat

Are you saying that a Mediterranean diet is rich in animal fat? Because that doesn't match the common definition of the word.

"These proportions are sometimes represented in the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid. In a diet with roughly this composition, the fat content accounts for 25% to 35% of the total intake of calories, while the amount of saturated fat is, at most, 8% of the calorie content."[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Dietary_com...

I haven't kept up with the debate over the 'Mediterranean' diet, has there been a consensus of the benefits of the diet? IIRC, a big flaw in the proponents of the trend was that a lot of those benefits -- cardiovascular, weight, etc -- could also be attributed to the lower stress and more active lifestyles in those cultures compared to Americans.

For context, the natural sugars found in fruits are called FRUCTOSE. High fructose corn syrup comes from corn that naturally produces fructose. I’m not saying HFCS is healthy but merely pointing out that just because “natural sugars such as what’s found in fruits” sounds healthy doesn’t mean it’s chemically different from the thing being vilified.

>High fructose corn syrup comes from corn that naturally produces fructose

Not true as explain in the first paragraph of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup

That's the thing though. They may be 'found' in one place or another, but it seems that the surrounding chemicals matter quite a bit more than we thought.

What surrounding chemicals? The mitigating factors in fruit is that the fructose is interspersed with plant matter that isn't pure sugar and occasionally the non-fructose plant matter contains other nutrients. The plant matter allows for slower absorption of fructose, thus blood glucose levels rise slower and the peak might be lower. However, there's nothing inately bad or good about the "surrounding" chemicals - if you eat too much fruit you'll have similar health consequences as if you were to consume similar amounts to high fructose corn syrup. Swap out fruit for fruit juice, the outcomes will be more similar still.

Fruit also contains glucose. Studies of HFCS suggest that the problems all come from lack of signaling. Your body doesn't "notice" the calories you obtained from the fructose, which causes all sorts of downstream issues.

To see the effect for yourself: Go to a fast food restaurant, and get the largest sized cup that would normally have HFCS soda in it. Fill the cup with sugar based soda, and drink the entire thing at a normal rate. You'll likely feel full / nauseous before you get to the bottom of it. This doesn't happen (as soon) with HFCS soda.

HFCS has nearly the same balance of fructose/glucose as sucrose does. Since you mention soft-drinks, that uses HFCS 55, which means 55% of the sugar is fructose. Apple juice, by comparison is 60% fructose.

Unless the claim is that it takes about 10% more sucrose based soda to fill you up (which would be lost in the noise were I to try it), I'm not sure your claim holds water.

Exactly. Lots HFCS is pretty bad for you. Lots of table sugar is also pretty bad for you. From the evidence I've seen, we should be railing against all quickly absorbed sugars, not specifically HFCS.

Unfortunately, the naturistic fallacy is insanely common.

the naturalistic argument is very often on the right track in the complex, widely misunderstood science of diet

sugar in nature is almost always paired with fiber, separating them makes the sugar much more harmful

The "rapidly absorbed" qualifier is an allusion to this. Fiber has several benefits, one being blunting the spike in blood sugar by slowing absorption.

Some foods are healthiest when unprocessed (other than the minimal processing involved in harvesting and shipping), but bioavailability of nutrients in others is greatly improved by cooking and/or other processing.

Certainly, the safety of most meats is greatly improved by cooking.

The point of the naturalistic argument is actually a good one. We keep pretending we understand all the mechanisms and yet we get baffled over and over when we do enough processing and even though the ingredients are all still there it turns out there was one more thing we weren't aware of that completely changes how we react to the food.

trying to guess what vitamins or whatever are missing from a demonstrably deficient diet is not going to beat a known wholesome diet, even if your worldview for some reason contests the existence of a 'known' 'wholesome' diet

it's hubris really

I mean, I would really like us to fully understand nutrition, and I'm optimistic that we eventually will... its just that we don't, right now. Not really.

The explanation I read was HFCS is roughly 50-50 fructose and glucose (it varies by blend). Sucrose is actually 50-50, but joined by a chemical bond. Sucrose is split into fructose and glucose during digestion by sucrase, so by the time it's in your blood stream, HFCS and sucrose are essentially the same thing.

I dont know anyone who thought input == output. Diets like keto clearly show the opposite.

Keto is a very special case where the body depletes its glucose storages so it switches to fat by force. It does work, but you have to stay out of any kind of carbohydrate for the rest of your life (or for whatever amount do you plan to stay in that state).

In non ketogenic states, input does somewhat equals output.

Nutrition experts still try to create a caloric deficit when they create nutrition plans.

If there was some sort of magic nutrient that made you lose weight by eating mostly the same food, I'm sure most nutrition experts would have known already.

> lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars

Its much worse. Active misdirection by using the same term to refer to entirely different products/processes. A is not equal to B just because A and B happen to contain the same ingredient C in majority quantity. (Chimps share 99.6% of our genes etc). Labeling glucose, sucrose & fructose with the common label sugar. Sucrose itself has 100s of varieties - https://www.whatsugar.com/post/unrefined-vs-raw-vs-refined-c... .In most tropical countries, sugarcane is consumed raw in copious quantities. I grew up in a village eating sugarcane from fields. We were poor, but we always had a few stalk of sugarcane. You just chew on it & grind it down. Nobody got diabetes or anything from that. You move to the city & then the refined white sugar comes in bottles & you see the ill-effects all around you. But you can't point out how these things don't happen in the village, because that would be unscientific, all sugar is sugar etc. So an industrial product like hfcs, something that doesn't exist in nature in any form & has to be manufactured in the factory, is also sugar, because the majority constituent has the same chemical composition as orange juice, so no drinking orange juice for breakfast because that's just sugar, which is the same sugar in coke & pepsi & maple syrup & since we're way too poor to afford actual Canadian 100% grade A maple syrup from the maple tree, we must substitute it with cheap hfcs syrup, which is also called maple syrup & sold as maple syrup ( there's a small asterisk in unreadable h6 font at the label footer that says its not the true maple syrup but who is reading that ? ). The price difference these days - true maple syrup is $20 a bottle while hfcs is $2 !!! 8 ounce of Manuka is $20. So what do we do ? Well, we fill up a drum with sweet white sugar water & place it in the open. The poor honeybee is too dumb to know the difference, its going to drink our sugar water instead of nectar, so the beekeepers actually recommend this! https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ So now we can sell this cheaper honey for a fifth of the price yay capitalism ftw.

Labeling lard, bacon, olive oils & avocados & ghee, coconut oil, butter, vegetable oil under the common "fat", compounded by the fact that we call people who are obese "fat", thus confusing dietary fat with lipose, to the extent people think if they eat eggs they become fat because the "fat" of the yolk is somehow equal to the lipose tissue of the fat person. Like every yolk you eat, the "fat" from yolk goes straight to the lipose tissues because we refer to these two very different things by the same label ! People actually point at fat people and say "it must be the butter, must be the bacon and eggs"...when its mostly the refined sugar in the cakes & cookies & dessert. Once again, look at the cost - 16oz of ghee is $10, but you can buy a few gallons of processed industrial canola oil for $10, so that's the right thing to do, because oil is oil & it is all fat anyway & hfcs is sugar & so is honey & javascript is java & python is R & everything is the same, my man, it is all turing complete, just use the cheaper one, otherwise you are fucking gatekeeping you fucking elitist what's that i can't hear you over the sound of my freedom rah rah rah.

Your post is horribly formatted and reads like you're raging (after rereading ... yeap, you're pissed off AF :D), but you hit the nail on the head and your rage is fully justified.

The vegetable oil thing is really going to come back and haunt us. A lot of phenomena get called "the new smoking" but I think heavy use of cheap vegetable oils is truly going to be the thing we look back on in horror in 50 years. Hope we get some solid studies on this in the near future.

..and we haven't even touched on gut flora, how that is affected, and how it effects us.

Good post

Thank you. I was typing out a comment like this in frustrated response to a different remark elsewhere in the thread (“calories in, calories out!”) but stopped. I’m glad I did because you put what I was going to say much better than I would have. Also I learned the word “stoicimetric,” so thanks for that.

I would expect that there's something else at play, it's entirely possible that natural honey contains some organic chemical that increases metabolism in humans.

Honey is acidic. I think that the main problem in the western diet is that we don't balance sugar and starch with enough spices, hot stuff or acid.

Whatever you eat gets dissolved by something like 10-20 teaspoons of stomach acid, which is roughly 100x-500x more acidic (linear scale) than honey. By the time it gets there a teaspoon of honey is not making a dent in the overall acidity.

My father got caught up in nutrition conspiracy and "alkaline diets", and now won't have a milkshake with a hamburger because "all the milk makes it harder to digest" since according to him it's neutralizing your stomach acid.

I think it's mostly that somewhere along the line he missed how logarithmic scales work.

Oh yeah, I read a book on that ages ago (start of millennium), by some fellow called Harvey Diamond. Just looked him up, looks like his royalties have dwindled and his son got jail time for a ponzi scheme.

Hey, if it leads to your father consuming less unhealthy food (which milkshake and hamburger both arguably are) it works. Just for a different reason. And that different reason gives the faulty one credibility.

> Hey, if it leads to your father consuming less unhealthy food (which milkshake and hamburger both arguably are) it works

Unfortunately not, he just eats them at separate times!

>stomach acid

Apples and oranges.

Unlike eating and excreting, the production (and destruction) of stomach acid doesn't change the body's overall pH.

Rather, the body produces acid by dumping alkalinity (specifically potassium bicarbonate) into the blood plasma.[0]

[0] https://teachmephysiology.com/gastrointestinal-system/stomac...

Excretion is the key point. There's no conservation law for acidity in a system that can selectively excrete acids or bases as necessary, as can all individuals without serious metabolic conditions.

If those who ate too few acids found a way to induce the excretion of too many of them, then they'd be in trouble.

I agree, it's not as simple as pH balance. The body is a complex adaptive system.

However, the mere fact that the body can remove something doesn't mean it's healthy, or that it doesn't stress the excretory system. See: ethanol, for example.

Most soft-drinks are acidic, and those seem to be consumed widely in the western diet.

Honey contains a few percent of "misformed" — not joined by the usual 1,4-saccharide linkage — disaccharides and oligosaccharides such as nigerose, kojibiose, etc. These likely persist into the large intestine and affect the balance of intestinal flora. Another significant (0.5-1%) component is gluconic acid, which supports mineral absorption. But translating these into anti-diabetic activities still requires some, er, creative thinking. There are also very small amounts of polyphenols — "antioxidants" — which are believed to affect insulin signaling, but these are present in other foods as well and no particularly strong candidate has been found to show an effect.

More obviously, honey is buffered at pH 4 (maybe due to 0.05% potassium content), which is roughly optimal for human tastes, and sweeter than sugar on a dry-weight basis (due to fructose). So, use less, etc.

> it's entirely possible that natural honey contains some organic chemical that increases metabolism in humans.

Not sure about honey, but this is true for figs. Since humans co-evolved with figs and our ancestors have likely been eating them for tens of millions of years, they don't spike your blood sugar as much as their sugar content would suggest on its own. (The book Gods, Wasps and Stranglers talks extensively about how humans likely co-evolved with figs.)

There's absolutely no way to assess the likelihood of lowering your fasting glucose via eating more honey without knowing what you're already eating. The paper itself describes the characteristics of the control groups of the included trials:

> Trial comparisons included the participant’s usual diet (70% of studies), sucrose (15%), high-fructose corn syrup (6%), and mixed comparators (9%).

Kind of hard to know what "the participant's usual diet" means, but I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say the intervention probably helped people who were otherwise eating a bunch of table sugar, HFCS, or both, and didn't help if you weren't eating sugar to begin with. The average diet of a person participating in studies like this is probably close to an average American diet, that is, high in added sugar.

Don't expect honey to be some kind of miracle panacea food. It's just better than table sugar and HFCS.

I used to put honey in my coffee when I still sweetened it. I read something about it having a slower release process and noticed I didn't have the same ups and downs throughout the day. There wasn't a sugar crash.

Now I just drink black coffee but I do occasionally add honey in my tea.

It's a great thing to keep around the house and can also be used to disinfect a cut.[1]

1 - https://www.sevengrains.com/the-healing-power-of-honey/

>I read something about it having a slower release process and noticed I didn't have the same ups and downs throughout the day. There wasn't a sugar crash.

Hey, thanks for putting out your anecdote. In the absence of good mainstream science, anecdotes end up being an important source of 'data' for me.

Does sugar raise fasting glucose in non-diabetics?

Fructose is metabolized via triglycerides iirc and so has a longer and different pathway to becoming blood sugar. That doesn't in itself mean anything good or bad. Honey is basically the same sucrose/fructose ratio as high fructose corn syrup, for what it's worth

Define honey. There are various types of honey, and I read the other day that honey from China is not 100% honey but is essentially something else which also contains honey.

Even among 100% real honey, the ratios of sucrose, glucose and fructose vary wildly. At the extremes tupelo honey is very high fructose, and thus is famous for not crystallizing easily. On the other hand, canola/rapeseed swings so far the other way that it can crystalize in the comb before harvesting.

Most supermarket honey, China or not, is HFCS + honey.

A beekeeper told me that the biggest indicator of real honey is that it solidifies with time. Because of that, it’s usually sold in glass containers so that you can heat it up to re-liquify it.

This just shows how bad table sugar really is (as well as HFCS for that matter).

Glucose and Sucrose are not similar.

Glucose is easily and readily available for the body's use, with little processing, and can be metabolized quickly energizing the brain directly (brains feed on glucose).

The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type and those are 'better' sugars for humans.

I'm a type 2 diabetic and I utilize honey instead of sugar wherever possible. I've been doing this for several years now, and there was a definite and definitive corrolation between my A1C levels prior to switching and after switching to Honey.

> The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type

Multiple sources say that honey is around 30% glucose, 40% fructose.

Honey is not sugar/sucrose — honey is an invert sugar which can be used directly by cells as a source of energy, whereas sucrose cannot. Bees also cannot eat sugar.

In the invert form your body, including your digestive lining, can put it directly to work.

I do not know if this is still the case if you dissolve it in tea or another hot beverage. I believe it is not.

> Bees also cannot eat sugar.

Are you sure about that? I came across this article in another comment: https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/

> However, the evidence for this effect in human studies has not been systematically evaluated and quantified.

One thing I noticed in the paper is a lack of breakdown of results based on diabetic diagnosis. With almost half of participants being "healthy" and only 21% being "diabetic" (specifically not isolating Type 1 from Type 2 and not specifying other diabetic conditions), the results of whether this information is useful to a diabetic gets skewed.

This is a harmful way to present this information because people will read into this that honey will help a diabetic. In fact, there's a comment to the linked article asking where a diabetic might find more information.

To be clear: Type 1 and 3 diabetics will need to dose the same amount of insulin for the carbs as they would any other sugar. Type 2 diabetics and PCOS will see a similar spike based on the glycemic index and the amount consumed. LADA and MODY will need to do whatever they normally do. If you're having glucose control issues already, this is not going to be a remedy and should not be sought as one. If you do have good glucose control, this MIGHT be something to watch for more research. Otherwise, this should have no bearing on your diabetic treatment.

> Overall, honey reduced fasting glucose (MD = −0.20 mmol/L, 95%CI, −0.37 to −0.04 mmol/L; low certainty of evidence), total cholesterol (MD = −0.18 mmol/L, 95%CI, −0.33 to −0.04 mmol/L; low certainty), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (MD = −0.16 mmol/L, 95%CI, −0.30 to −0.02 mmol/L; low certainty), fasting triglycerides (MD = −0.13 mmol/L, 95%CI, −0.20 to −0.07 mmol/L; low certainty), and alanine aminotransferase (MD = −9.75 U/L, 95%CI, −18.29 to −1.21 U/L; low certainty) and increased high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (MD = 0.07 mmol/L, 95%CI, 0.04–0.10 mmol/L; high certainty).

Note the amount of "low certainty". Note the confidence intervals. This is what passes for dietary science these days, gets news headlines and people in this thread and elsewhere taking it as gospel. I guess no one even took the time to read the abstract of the paper.

EDIT: the list of funding sources and potential conflict of interests at the end of the paper is a sight to behold: https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article/do...

Believe science

I don’t know the motivations behind your (apparently) whimsical comment, but it speaks volumes to how a study as inoffensive as the beneficial effects of honey can invite so much discord, scrutiny and counter-argumentative “anecdata” when it’s deemed rebellious, dim-witted and conspiratorial to do the same for other scientific research.

It’s because Big Honey hasn’t polarized the collective yet, just wait.

Those are are all reductions with 95% certainty. That's somewhat significant, especially combined, is it not?

> Those are are all reductions with 95% certainty. That's somewhat significant, especially combined, is it not?

Depends on how many total things they measured.

B-Hacking. ;-)

Depends on how many other people tried performing this experiment and decided not to publish their insignificant results. We'll never know...

>Declaration of interest. T.A.K. has received research support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the International Life Sciences Institute, and the National Honey Board.

Hillarious. The study that says honey good got support from honey.com

I almost missed the support section for authors C.W.C.K. and J.L.S because they are ridiculously long.

"Ethical Approval

Ethical approval was not required for this research."

International Life Sciences Institute, financed by food and chemical industries such as BASF, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Syngenta and Pepsi

>Hillarious. The study that says honey good got support from honey.com

What is so hilarious about this? A site that advocates for a product supports anyone who can prove them right, that is just common sense. Would it be equally hilarious if the White House supported a study to show democracy was great? "Oh look, a "democracy" state funded this study, so surely it's all bogus!" Please, think for yourselves, don't just imitate.

I think the parent is pointing to the obvious issue that even an appearance of a conflict of interest undermines the validity of the study even if it does not automatically disqualify it ( edit: not to search very far, at my employer there can't even be an appearance of conflict of interest ). Separately, as some other posters noted, it is interesting that this part will not make the news, but the fact that product X does Y will.

And this also brings out another interesting point about the world we live in today. We have so many resources at our fingertips. I don't consider myself an average consumer, but there is not a day, where I don't find something new about the world and how it operates. It is genuinely hard and time-consuming to dig into details for every single little thing. You have to be able to defer to some level of authority ( and verification of data ), because you will not be able to complete any other relevant work.

This underscores it that point. Most people will start buying more honey. People on HN will tear the paper apart.

So if you speak highly of honey, you get funding from honey.com. If you don't, you get nothing. Now, if you rely on donations to pursue your research, wouldn't that skew the results in favor of honey?

You might want to do some reading about something called "conflict of interest."

At least it’s stated and the results qualified as low confidence.

Everyone else has free agency too. Read the fine print rather than assume it’s Sesame Street out there. Adults should know the drill by now. “Grin and bear” it or get more involved spreading what you think is a better message in a more constructive way than ranting in barely noticed HN comment section.

Personally, I am going to be an adult and accept the world does not owe me coddling my sensibilities and lean heavily into DIY living. On the upside is society collapses or globalism contracts greatly, I have shit tons of hours behind me building wide and deep set of skills. And if it doesn’t well, I wasn’t sitting on social media.

How is that hilarious? Do you expect Exxon or Facebook to fund studies on honey?

If you believe honey has good properties, and you even go into the honey business because you believe in it so much, do you just need to wait around until an independent researcher gets the idea to study honey to find out about it?

How about this: can you point to any part of the study which is improper or wrong or looks like this bias may have affected it?

This argument reminds me of back in the day how republicans lambasted al gore for both caring about climate change, and being invested in solar panel companies. Maybe the reason he invested in the companies is exactly because he cares about the issue.

It would be less hilarious if there were more "honey bad funded by big honey" studies. But those seem to be rare. "Alcohol bad for you funded by Budweiser" stories never seem to show up on HN but if they did they would immediately get my attention.

I'm a bit perplexed by your comments (and a sibling one) who seems to take great ire (offense?) to a comment that take a part out of the linked article that I personally found "Hillarious".

>How about this: can you point to any part of the study which is improper or wrong or looks like this bias may have affected it?

The comment that I commented on did exactly this; did you expect me to recite that part? I get your criticism if I directly commented on the article, but I merely commented on the additional detail already presented in a comment. (or are you suggesting that a requirement for finding something hilarious is a thoroughly analyzed rebuttal on top of an existing criticism?)

Also, again, I didn't make any argument, but a comment of a quote (observation) presented in the source material linked by parent comment.

so I'd suggest take a step back, read the two comments, ask yourself "what context am I willfully ignoring and putting word in to the commenters mouth"

Thanks for your opinion though, interesting fact about politics and al gore

No, the comment you commented on didn't do that. That person was commenting on the reaction to the paper - of the science journos that wrote an article about it, and readers who took the article's take as gospel. Which is why they ended their post with "I guess no one even took the time to read the abstract of the paper". Because the abstract is fairly innocuous and straight forward, as is the conclusion.

If your assertion is that GPs criticism is about the confidence intervals and the prevalence of "low certainty" - that is the conclusion of the paper. The researchers can't really know the conclusions until they do the research. So would it be better if they didn't publish their paper since the results weren't a glowing endorsement of honey? Isn't it a good thing they published results and called out the fact that they are low certainty?

And if the criticism was the conflict of interest, that is what I responded to.

> Do you expect Exxon or Facebook to fund studies on honey?

yes, through the public research funds allocated from taxes

Can't wait for the next government drawn food pyramid.

You might want to do some reading about something called "conflict of interest."

I'm familiar with it.

Great comment.

So you have no qualms with the research paid for by tobacco companies or oil companies either, I take it?

Re: the list of funding sources and conflicts of interests --- text-davinci-003 was really helpful here for quickly sorting out the categories of these funding sources. Here's a dump of the sources separated into three categories:

Non-government entities: - Canadian Foundation for Innovation - Ontario Research Fund - Diabetes Canada - PSI Foundation - Banting and Best Diabetes Centre - American Society for Nutrition (ASN) - International Nut and Dried Fruit Council Foundation (INC) - National Dried Fruit Trade Association - National Honey Board - Pulse Canada - Quaker Oats Center of Excellence - United Soybean Board - Tate and Lyle Nutritional Research Fund at the University of Toronto - Glycemic Control and Cardiovascular Disease in Type 2 Diabetes Fund at the University of Toronto - Nutrition Trialists Fund at the University of Toronto - Almond Board of California - California Walnut Commission - Peanut Institute - Barilla - Unilever/Upfield - Unico/Primo - Loblaw Companies - Quaker - Kellogg Canada - WhiteWave Foods/Danone - Nutrartis - FoodMinds LLC - International Sweeteners Association - Nestlé - Canadian Society for Endocrinology and Metabolism - GI Foundation - Abbott - General Mills - Biofortis - Northern Ontario School of Medicine - INC Nutrition Research & Education Foundation - European Food Safety Authority - Comité Européen des Fabricants de Sucre (CEFS) - Nutrition Communications - International Food Information Council - Calorie Control Council - Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine - Perkins Coie LLP - Tate & Lyle - Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung Zucker e.V. - Danone - Inquis Clinical Research - European Fruit Juice Association Scientific Expert Panel - Soy Nutrition Institute Scientific Advisory Committee - Advanced Food Materials Network - International Tree Nut Council Research and Education Foundation - Paramount Farms - Sun-Maid - International Pasta Organization - Lantmannen - Nutrition Foundation of Italy - Oldways Preservation Trust - International Carbohydrate Quality Consortium - Toronto 3D Knowledge Synthesis and Clinical Trials Foundation - AB InBev - Canola Council of Canada

Government Entities: - Province of Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and Science - Canadian Institutes of Health Research - US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Honey Checkoff program - US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Soy Checkoff program - Alberta Pulse Growers - World Health Organization - Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism, and Diabetes - Health Canada - University of Toronto - European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) - Canadian Cardiovascular Society - Obesity Canada/Canadian Association of Bariatric Physicians and Surgeons - ILSI North America - Food, Nutrition, and Safety Program - Technical Committee on Carbohydrates of ILSI North America - Nutrition Science Advisory Committee to Health Canada (Government of Canada) - Scientiﬁc Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) Subgroup on the Framework for the Evaluation of Evidence (Public Health England) - Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada

Entities for which you cannot determine, or do not know, if they are government funded or not: - Helderleigh Foundation (Canada)

> Quaker Oats Center of Excellence

Well, aren't we overselling.

I absolutely 100% guarantee a former Army field grade/general officer was in the room when they came up with that name.

It's a popular term of art in medicine as well.

My current employer uses that terminology as well, for different major departments. It's amusing, but many corporations have been huffing their own farts for a loooong time.

For the past decade or two, the Health Service Executive in Ireland have been trying to convince the citizenry that having “centres of excellence” in large (for Ireland) cities is worth the closing down of regional hospitals and other medical services in towns throughout Ireland.

Ooh, could you explain how you did this?

From the end of the abstract:

> “The takeaway is more about replacement — if you’re using table sugar, syrup or another sweetener, switching those sugars for honey might lower cardiometabolic risks.”

It is well-known that all currently available non-caloric sweeteners increase cardiometabolic risks. I wonder if their results hold if they eliminate all study participants that reduced their intake of such sweeteners.

> It is well-known that all currently available non-caloric sweeteners increase cardiometabolic risks.

I'd honestly like to hear more about this, thank you in advance.

As would I. I keep reading so much conflicting evidence. All I know is that every sweetener I've ever used made me hungrier than if I didn't use it, and made me want more. I haven't tried those berries that make sour things taste sweet yet, curious about that.

Why wouldnt it? You're used to the calories in your drink.

Ive drank a coke zero almost every other day for a year. Maybe at first you will feel this but it's your body adjusting for what it expected.

Calories in, calories out.

If there are any questions about my state / behaviors let me know!

Oh, I meant having something sweet regardless of why makes me hungrier vs something that isn't sweet. So black coffee doesn't make me hungry like stevia in coffee does. And diet dr peoper makes me hungry, while sparkling water makes me full.

Exactly what I mean - your mind associates sweet = calories. It's just a matter of time until the association degrades. (Source: me)

Ah, that makes sense, but you'd have to avoid anything sweet with calories to keep the connection broken right?

No, when you encounter something contradictory your mind goes from 'all sweet things are calorie dense' to 'not all sweet things are calorie dense' :)

Your results match the animal studies very well. When you give rats artificial sweetener in their water and free access to all the food they could want they eat more than rats given plain water.

The sweet taste seems to stimulate appetite and feeding beyond normal needs. It’s not hard to see how American obesity keeps increasing given even this one simple experiment.

Is this true for Stevia as well?

That's a strong statement. The association is well known for sugar-sweetened beverages but remains highly unclear for non-nutritive sweeteners, both in terms of correlation and direction of casualty.

citation needed.

It's quite possible that switching to honey, which is often (though not always) higher in fructose than table sugar & corn syrup, reduces total glycemic load without the downsides of the non-caloric sweeteners.

Maple syrup has a lower glycemic index than both honey and agave. I think it’a a better choice.

Just curious, but how much does it cost in your area if you don't mind my asking? Maple syrup is ~$1 an ounce here, while honey is only ~30¢.

Fructose is not glucose (obviously) so sure, changing to a sweetener with more fructose and less glucose is going to reduce your blood glucose measurement.

However, the fructose has to be processed by your liver, just like alcohol. And too much can lead to fatty liver disease, just like alcohol, and all of the problems that come from that. So eliminating sweeteners in general (if you already have metabolic disorder) is going to be a better choice than switching from one to another.

Yes...but this study wasn't about any of that, so I'm not sure I see the relevance?

> I guess no one even took the time to read the abstract of the paper.

It's a pity you ruined an otherwise interesting comment with this flippant remark. Aside from being against HN rules, it just grates, like you finished your comment by calling everyone else idiots.

(HN rules also say to ignore the lowest quality part of comments and focus on the higher quality part, so here I am breaking the rules too BTW.)

This is fair criticism, and I admit I got far too incensed. Thank you.

Dietary news of terrible quality gets often shared on here and I get annoyed when I enter a comment thread and, judging by how many were saying "yeah, I knew honey was good", no one had bothered to read the paper itself, but were reacting on the headline.

And so perpetuates the bad science and the bad dietary advice everyone is fond of sharing.

Good catch.

In the past dietary science consisted of paying scientists to fudge results to sell more sugary products.

Transparency even if it’s underwhelming is exactly what we want. Sorry, not sorry it’s not exciting enough for the old crank crowd. Feel free to independently experiment in on yourself.

It's amazing how much money is spent on abusing perception. A great justification of why it should be progressively harder to accumulate wealth, not easier.

Those confidence intervals all support the main statements since they don't include "zero reduction", right?

Surely it would be more of a conflict of interest for the funders if the main subject was maple syrup and not honey? /s

Research paper for the basis of the article [0]

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article/do...

I wonder if the submitted link should be changed to your link. I can access your link fine but I get an error when I try to access the submitted link.

One of my relatives tried that and actually found out that her blood glucose levels had actually worsened.

She must have seen some of these facebook viral posts abouymt the benefits of raw honey consumption.

Probably has to be taken in moderation.

In any case, just anecdotal.

Did she take care to source her honey from reputable sources?

A lot of "honey" is honey mixed with syrup.

Imported from Africa, with the honeycomb. Specific flowers and straight from the owner. She even filtered it herself.

You should be careful with honey as there is a lot of fake honey in circulation, mostly from China.

When possible, only buy artisan honey or honey sold at reputable local shops.

Local honey is supposed to have a benefit of helping your body deal with allergens as well.

That’s because it contains small amounts of the pollen you might be allergic to. So it’s really important that it’s raw, because you don’t want to cook the proteins that the pollen is made of.

Why do you not want to cook the proteins? Does it break them down to uselessness, or do the become harmful?

Heat changes the protein structure, so antibodies might no longer recognize them: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9826012/

FWIW, that's been thoroughly debunked. For the vast majority of people who suffer from seasonal allergies, they are not allergic to the same plants that bees pollinate.

It’s probably true that most seasonal allergies are cause by wind-pollinated plants, but bees sometimes help to pollinate those kinds of plants if they happen to be the closest food source. I have ash trees (Fraxinus) in my neighborhood, and even though they’re primarily wind-pollinated, I always see lots of bees gathering their pollen in the springtime. But bees would probably prefer flowers with more nectar if they’re available.

A good number of popular Honey brands don't sell Honey, they sell some sort of Chinese syrups that mimic Honey.

In India, there was a huge uproar on this when it was found that several popular and 'herbal' brands sell Chinese syrups in the name of Honey. Google it.

Yeah you need the raw stuff that is not heated. There is usually some firm honey in there and not just a fluid substance.

Yeah, the trials were done with ~2 TBS of honey daily or around 128 calories. Could definitely see people going way above that or using low quality honey. YMMV on products like honey and olive oil based on the quality of the manufacturer

I think a big factor that hasn't been mentioned is how the honey was consumed. Was it on an empty stomach? Before, during, after a meal? What did the meal contain? Does consuming it after waking up or before going to bed have an effect?

Just saying something is beneficial for your health without knowing the method of consumption is like saying sunscreen is good for you without mentioning it's supposed to go on your body and not in your mouth.

> One of my relatives tried that and actually found out that her blood glucose levels had actually worsened

That does not seem surprising to me. Honey has a worse glucose/fructose ratio than table sugar.

The "Honey Souk" in Morocco's Marakech medina sells the best and most diverse selection of honey I've ever seen. If I could travel one hour at a time, I'd go get Shirunashi Tantanmen ramen noodles at King-ken in Hiroshima, then go honey shopping at the Honey Souk in Marakech.

This ramen is a reason to visit Hiroshima, it's that good. This honey is a reason to visit Marakech, it's that good. (Otherwise, if one visits one medina, it should be Fes.)

There are too many people missing legs in Morocco from diabetes for me to easily accept this study.

"Honey, especially robinia, clover, and unprocessed raw honey, may improve.."

Scientific papers on the benefits of honey tend to be infomercials for the honey industry.

How do you figure it out? If the suggested "good" honey is limited to a specific geographic region. The local honey industry can benefit from the positive exposure. They don't do these informecials if the honey can be obtained from all over the world.

Where does the Robinia tree grow natively?

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

Doesn't "unprocessed raw honey" include all quality honey, anyway?

My guess is that most processed raw honey is not as good (or even bad), but those (robinia and clover) might be better than the rest. Still, I would rather get unprocessed robinia/clover honey rather than their processed variants.

According to the article, "processing" refers to heating.

Most commercial honey has been pasteurized, which appears to destroy whatever substance exists in raw honey and has favorable effect on glycemia.

Even using honey in a too hot drink or in a baked cake might eliminate most of the health effects of raw honey.

Can someone in the know tell me whether this should be ignored like most nutritional research?

Yes.

Can you explain why, or link me to some reference?

AFAIK (not an expert) there are two common problems with nutritional research

1) Mechanistic data we don't fully understand the implications of.

This basically means we observe mechanisms that we believe ought to have some effect on people, and yet when longitudinal studies are done to measure actual long term effects, they are not statistically significant

2) Confounding factors.

In longitudinal studies, it can be very difficult to fully control for confounding factors, as diets are very complex. Take a hypothetical red meat study, where participants are simply instructed to eat "more red meat". Is a McDonalds burger different than a lean, grassfed steak? That's an easy one to control for, not the best example. But basically exemplifying how there can be a lot of variability within the intervention itself when it comes to nutrition

Yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015681

No. Unless conflict of interest,most nutritional research shouldn't be ignored. How you interpret academic research is up to you, and might be out of your league.

Seems like GP is acknowledging that he’s out of his league, thus asking others to tell him if it’s worth while. And you’re responding by telling him he’s out of his league.

I said that it shouldn't be ignored, but it is useless to him, as it's out of his league. What he probably wants is directives about what he should or should not eat. This is not the conclusion he can derive from a paper.

Link to actual study: https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article/do...

Some things I noticed: This is a meta-analysis, not a direct study by the authors. This is looking for an effect in other people's data.

There are 18 studies with a total of 1105 individuals. This is very very low for a meta-analysis.

They identified 81 studies that they 'wanted' to use, but they had to exclude all but 18.

They have a nice chart: https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/381075699/nuac086...

Look at the rightmost 2 columns. The only 'good' outcome with a large effect has low certainty. (Bottom Row, NAFLD)

The only outcome with at least moderate effect and certainty has a bad outcome (Inflammation markers)

In summary, the press release is truly garbage.

The study is not bad, it shows the state of knowledge and research in this area, which shows that honey is food, not magic.

It should not be ignored, but like almost all nutrition studies, it should only change our confidence in our beliefs a little: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ56uOkjccg

Besides the question of the legitimacy of this post. I would encourage everyone to go and explore horrible practice of honey production. Along with the effects honey bees having on native species and wild bees. Which ties in to effective pollinators and why we hear about "rapid decreasing bee population".

I'm not sure I follow. What is the research you would recommend folks look at? I'm not clear on the conclusion you are coming to... is producing honey via bee farms bad for local environments??

The argument is that non-native honey bees (if you live in the US) put pressure on the native pollinators competing for the same food sources. It makes sense logically, since commercial producers will have huge bee yards and do migratory beekeeping to follow the pollination contracts and the honey flows. I have not, however, ever seen a study on it. I've also never really gone looking.

Could you be more specific? I kept bees for a decade and don't know what you're referring to.

Paper here: https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1093-nutrit-nuac086.pdf

This is why I exclusively drink Jack Daniel's tennessee honey whisky during work hours.

Honey has been consumed for hundreds if not thousands of years. In ancient medicinal systems it is given a special status as a conduit for herbs and medicines. Even the ancient rg vedic texts make special mention of honey. It is also used in ritualistic worship. Obviously none of that has to mean anything from a scientific lens, but it does seem interesting why it tends to pop up across history in interesting ways. Frankly I think it is also mentioned because it is edible and sweet and mildly intoxicating in large quantities and can also be made into mead

Still never gets old. As Juvenal said, it's hard not to write satire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iG6Hrh4v08

Too bad the bees are done. Maybe the AI guys can leave artists alone and jump on this looming mass extinction thing. Would be nice to solve something that needs solving for a change.

The domestic honey bee is honestly doing fine these days, varroa is better understood and controlled (for now) in captive populations.

These results seem inconsistent with the current understanding that the majority of the sugar in honey comes from fructose, and as such can be very damaging to the liver (fructose is a major contributing factor for 'fatty liver disease.') 'Use in moderation' is a fine cover-your-butt, but how many people do you know who consume anything in moderation, especially in the USA?

In moderate quantities, fructose cannot be harmful.

Nevertheless, with easy access to concentrated forms, like sugar, but also honey and dried fruits, it has become possible to eat too much fructose per day, which is guaranteed to have bad health effects, like damaging the liver.

The recommendation that I have seen is to eat up to 50 g/day of sugar, i.e. up to 25 g/day of fructose.

When eating only fresh or defrosted fruits, it is easy to follow this, because the upper limit corresponds with around 500 g of most cultivated fruits or with around 300 g of the sweetest fruits, like grapes or fresh figs.

On the other hand, a single chocolate may contain more than 60 g of sugar.

title: "honey consumption improves.."

content: "honey consumption MAY improve"

".. when consumed within a healthy dietary pattern"

let's share this article!

Nutrition studies are almost always shit and mainstream articles are 99% garbage.

Error in Nutrition studies

- People drop out -> introduces bias

- human survey data is used -> people lie

Journalists run the same stupid playbook

- Watch XYZ journal for a new article

- Read abstract and infer something - "almonds can lower BLANK and increase muscle mass"

- Write article about how scientists say almonds are gonna change your life

- (if bodybuilding) insert a workout optimized for almonds

Does it still holds for the fake honey (glucose syrup with added fake pollen) that we often find in lieu of real honey?

>honey is also a complex composition of common and rare sugars, proteins, organic acids and other bioactive compounds that very likely have health benefits.

Seems like an extremely ripe area for Biotech research. Add this mix of compounds to most processed foods and you get a blanket improvement in health outcomes. Would be a miracle

Best "fun-fact" about honey is it never spoils.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-be...

Fruits are quite better for us, because their fiber, ripe to fermented is better too

It is almost like these "studies" are sitting on a stack, ready for publication when there isn't a lot of interesting news. Coffee good, coffee bad. Wine good (in moderation), wine bad, eggs good, eggs bad, etc., etc.

Delete.

> Honey, especially robinia (also known as acacia honey, a honey from false acacia or black locust trees), clover, and unprocessed raw honey, may improve glycemic control and lipid levels when consumed within a healthy dietary pattern, (...)

The key word here is "within a healthy dietary pattern". Unfortunately, most people in US are not on a healthy dietary pattern and have some level of insulin resistance which means any benefits would probably be smaller than added damage.

Whoever is looking to improve their health I would urge to skip any notion sugary products are going to make them healthier until they are sure they got rid of their insulin resistance.

(disclaimer: I am not a dietician or even doctor at all. Please, don't construe this as professional advice. I am just a geek who is spending a huge amount of time trying to separate actual information from overwhelming disinformation on anything related to dieting.)

Honey makes me smart, or so I feel. It awakens some interesting mental dynamics on myself. How? No other sugar does it, perhaps a bit maple juice.

I'm over "food X will lower your cholesterol" headlines.

if you have a cholesterol problem, your options are:

1. cut saturated fats in the diet by at least 80%

2. take statins

I do maybe 30% of option 1 and 80% of option 2 (low dose). As I get older, the effectiveness of the statins appears to decrease so I'd like to raise my dose but my doc is not on board yet.

LDL cholesterol is no joke so I dont get the point of these "X might reduce your cholesterol a tiny amount if you have an amazing diet already", well great

To say LDL cholesterol is misunderstood is an understatement. I recommend this as a primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXKJaQeteE0

tl;dw: there are many types of LDL which are not adequately represented in blood tests, unless subject to expensive centrifuges. LDL is how the body delivers fatty acids to be used as energy to the rest of the body, but in contact with high levels of sugar, becomes glycated, vulnerable to oxidation and stays in the bloodstream instead of being used or reabsorbed by the liver. Then it accumulates in the walls lining your arteries.

So the take away is: do not eat tons of fat with tons of sugar if you care about your arteries. One or the other are not necessarily bad.

Also statins are terrible with worse side effects. Fix your diet, not the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests.

Just get an Apo B blood lipid test. You’ll find that it correlates with LDL anyways, but Apo B is the best marker we have, better than measuring the amount of carriers. But unlikely to divorce much, so that kind of LDL “optimism” is kind of a waste of time.

> Also statins are terrible with worse side effects. Fix your diet, not the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests.

Whether or not to take a statin is a _complicated_ decision, based on _many_ variables. Maybe statins didn't work out in your situation, but please don't suggest things like this.

"Fix your diet" is _very_ difficult, as well as ambiguous (e.g. carnivores and vegans will both claim that their diet will save lives. Vegans have more actual data, carnivores are louder and more interested in pointing out possible mechanisms).

The best research we have suggests that statins save a _lot_ of lives. _And_ that most of the "adverse reaction to statin" effects are statistically indistinguishable from people who aren't on statins. Heck, look at the "Adverse Effects" section of the wikipedia page. Cerivastatin _did_ raise the risk of muscle issues, some of them serious. But A) not by much, and B) it's been withdrawn for > 20 years.

FWIW, I'm one of those people who eats "well", runs, lifts, meditates, used to drink white wine until the correlation was disproved,... and still had a cholesterol over 500. Until I started taking my current statin. That means I'm actually one of the comparatively few people on a statin who doesn't know that it reduces my risk (the mechanism of cholesterol regulation and/or production in me is different than in most people. We don't actually know whether statins lower my risk. We do know that statins lower my cholesterol, and that lowers risk for people with the more common mechanisms, so I'm playing the odds.).

Re: side effects, I _think_ I had increased muscle soreness after lifting when I started on statins, but I googled, and that's also a thing that just happens to people around 40. Right now I'm 50, pulling more than twice what I weigh, and still running, so it can't be _that_ big an issue. It's not like I was a professional athlete until I started taking statins. Which is a sample size of 1, but that's backed up by the studies, so...

> "not the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests"

We know that lowering "the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests" correlates with lowering your risk of cardiovascular issues. So actually, yes, as a rule, lower the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood test. Statins aren't the only way, but they do a lot of good for a lot of people.

NB: I'm not affiliated with any statin producer, except that I take a statin daily. I'm also not a doctor, but I've had ridiculously high cholesterol since I was in utero, and have been trying to keep abreast of the research for about 30 years now.

> The best research we have suggests that statins save a _lot_ of lives.

The best research we have suggests that statins do bugger all, maybe reducing a little your LDL, while other research shows a correlation between LDL levels and longevity. Yes that's right, people living longer tend to have higher levels of maligned LDL. Which means we have no idea how lipid metabolism works still.

If you liked that talk from Dr. Mason about cholesterol, here's one about statins and how little useful they actually are: https://youtu.be/I7r4j1u42V8

They are actually good at reducing cholesterol, sure, but it's just a misunderstood marker. Doctors use it to measure your health but it is not per se dangerous. Having pathological levels of cholesterol in utero would benefit from it, but if you're eating burger and pizzas, fix your diet, a pill's not gonna save you.

1 is pretty incorrect according to modern metabolic understanding, no? A large chunk of LDL production comes from the liver, and complex carbohydrates tend to leave the most LDL behind after running through the liver. Reductions in sweet processed foods would help the most there, not reductions in fats. Exercise helps a good deal with the same problems too.

The study is a bit suspect, and it makes me wonder if all that really happened is that participants replace HFCS with honey, which doesn’t have the same impact on the liver.

> complex carbohydrates tend to leave the most LDL behind after running through the liver.

reduced my carbs, lost 15 pounds (I'm not obese to start with) LDL stayed super high. no decrease of any kind.

> Reductions in sweet processed foods would help the most there, not reductions in fats.

I dont eat sweet processed foods anyway, nope

> Exercise helps a good deal with the same problems too.

tried that, nope

what worked (dramatically) is:

1. cut out dairy

2. take statins

Saturated fats are not an issue; its transfats which are unhealthy. The saturated fat hype was possibly started by the sugar industry, and debunked some good 15-20 years ago by Martijn Katan et al.

you are mistaken, the link between saturated fat and LDL cholesterol is extremely well documented and widely known, also matches my personal experience just for good measure.

the only controversies about reducing saturated fats have to do with secondary effects, such as, "person might eat too many carbs if they reduce saturated fats too much", things like that. There are also some quacks who have tried to claim that LDL cholesterol levels are not important and even that arteriosclerosis is not a cause of heart attacks. You can go pretty far with this kind of stuff, when following the science means one has to radically change their diet in order to avoid heart disease, people really want there to be another answer.

Saturated fats increase total cholesterol and by extension risk, but the ldl ratio is worsened when you include refined carbs and sugar, with little in the way of fiber and protein.

I went on a period of sugar / carb reduction for many months and lost 15 pounds but my cholesterol numbers were unchanged, at that time. radically different diet re: carbs with the same amount of dairy consumption had zero effect on my LDL numbers.

People naturally have higher cholesterol as they age, so it may not be that the statin is less effective, but simply that your body is trying harder to increase its cholesterol.

I agree with your take and advice. This year I received a cholesterol tests with about 200 LDL-C (97th percentile). I panicked and switched to a whole food plant based diet and after about 10 days on the plant based diet I payed to have a lab tests my cholesterol again. My LDL-C dropped about 50 points in 10 days on a plant based diet. I eliminated almost all saturated fat and continue to limit them to about 13 grams per day (AHA recommendation, which is especially strict), and my cholesterol has continued to improve over the months.

I haven't started statins yet. My doctor doesn't want to start me on them with my current ~135 LDL-C. I'm going to see what more I can do with diet, exercise, weight loss, etc.

Basically any form of sugar is to put it in simple words a poison. As far as I understand every living organism produces glucose, which if I'm not mistaken is the fuel of life. So if human bodies already produce glucose there shouldn't be any need for anyone to ingest sugar in any of its forms. I have read many years ago a very a interesting book backed by scientific data about this topic but I can't remember the name of it.

Completely incorrect. Where do you think glucose comes from?

Many processes in the body produce water. This does not obviate the need to drink.

Maybe I made a mistake. What I meant is that when you ingest food the body processes it and one of the products is glucose. So you can completely put aside all sugar ingestion, that's what I wanted to say. You've said that everything I said is completely incorrect so it would be great if you can expand yourself why everything is so wrong.

Partially correct. Gluconeogenesis produces sufficient glucose for (adult) humans to survive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis

Edit: Added „adult“

Well that settles it then…

Any form of sugar? That includes essentially all fruits and most vegetables.

Dangerous to say this, and quite likely very wrong.

As is the belief that sugar does not drive high cholesterol.

Is the sugar in Honey/Fruit better than the sugar in say, twinkies?

I think meta analysis papers can be replaced with AI relatively soon.

Natural sugar water raises blood sugar? No way!

It is not a surprise. Honey has a GI of 60.

Just thanks for sharing this!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com