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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

Saturated fat increases LDL by increasing the particle size, whereas it seems to be increases in particle number that are associated with increased cardiovascular risk. This is likely why studies fail to find any real world increase in risk, and the saturated fat heart disease theory, while still under debate, is mostly out of favor nowadays.

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Yes, saturated fat is unjustly maligned. And from an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't make sense that it would be so harmful; pre-agricultural diets had lots of saturated fat so human metabolisms should have evolved to handle it well.

Evolutionary arguments here don't make much sense - the vast majority of human history we had average lifespans on the order of 25 or 30 years. If the negative effects of something (like heart disease) typically fail to manifest within that window there is no selection mechanism by which this kind of eating has an effect on long-term evolution of the species.

I thought that was only true if you included infant deaths. I haven’t researched it but that’s what I as a layman thought.

You are off by a factor of 2. If you exclude deaths in early childhood people regularly made it to their 60s

But if everyone is done having kids by their mid 30's, the increase in heart disease risk in their 50's still wouldn't show up as an evolutionary pressure. Especially when you consider humans are tribal animals and parental survival is not critical to offspring survival as long as the tribe keeps going.

One interesting hypothesis I've heard is that there is actually a huge selection pressure for long human lifespans, to preserve cultural knowledge and skills necessary for survival, as well as to help with child care. The parenting age adults can't exactly hunt and gather if they have to watch babies all day long- yet human children are pretty helpless and need almost constant care for years.

As a dad, even in modern times I couldn't work at all without someone to help with parenting... however if I can work, I could bring in enough resources to support an entire family.

I would imagine having pepaw & memaw around to watch the kiddos while mom and dad were out gathering food would be a huge boon as far as keeping your progeny alive to reproduce again.

>The parenting age adults can't exactly hunt and gather if they have to watch babies all day long- yet human children are pretty helpless and need almost constant care for years.

Gathering food or light manual work? You just stick 'em in a papoose (we used a shoulder sling). Heavier work, hang the papoose in a tree. Once they can walk they can gather food and do light work.

I'm not saying grandparents wouldn't make it easier, but babies/toddlers are quite adaptable.

I think for hunting (with weapons) you'd want them to be at least 5.

Hmm, good call. Your comment about longer lifespans having an indirect impact on the spread of personal genetic material is also insightful. Glad to be corrected!

As others have mentioned, this is true, but is a great illustration of how averages are extremely misleading when representing non-normally distributed data, and are used excessively in popular culture and media. Modal (most common single digit) lifespan of hunter gatherers is usually in the 70s, despite low averages (mean) due to high infant mortality [1]. Modern health care massively reduced infant mortality, but doesn't change mortality much in middle years, when most people don't actually need any healthcare.

[1] https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-3...

That's also incomplete knowledge. If you made it to adult hood your chances of living to 50 or 60 are way underestimated by "pop culture ancient humans" knowledge. Kids are kind of weak compared to adults immune system wise (in most cases!).

Also, when our bodies store calories (de novo lipogenesis), other forms of calories are converted to saturated fats. It doesn't make sense that our bodies main calorie store would be basically 'poison.' Is starch poisonous to a potato?

I've heard that, for the most part, small dense LDL is what is mostly found in cardiovascular disease.

well chocolate is high in calories and much more so when you buy a product that adds a bunch of sugar. this is relevant because people who eat a lot of chocolate have bad health but still probably dont have any lead problems aside from subtle, low dose related ones, which will be hard to distinguish from having unhealthy calory intake

Most "chocolate" products really have little, if any chocolate. Google says Hershey's milk chocolate is only 11% actual cacao. Still, plenty of people eat 85-100% cacao dark chocolate, or even savory chocolate foods like Mole in Mexican food, which I think should be considered separately from, e.g. chocolate flavored candy. Interestingly, cacao is one of the best dietary sources of copper, and it seems plausible that getting more copper this way would overall reduce risk of cardiovascular disease [1-3].

  [1] https://perfecthealthdiet.com/2012/11/chocolate-what-is-the-optimal-dose/ 
  [2] https://perfecthealthdiet.com/recommended-supplements/
  [3] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/204871/dark-chocolate-cuts-heart-deaths-australian-study

you get enough copper (to meet national recommendations) just by eating anything, no need to seek it out.

what i want to know is how to correctly interpret all these studies that claim some food substantially increases health outlooks.

while those are spam websites (buy this, buy that, amazonamazonamazonamazonamazon), its still possible for them to be correct

If you follow those links deeper, there is substantial reduction in cardiovascular disease risk with higher copper intake from supplementation, if it is balanced with zinc intake. National recommendations just prevent acute deficiency symptoms and don't address chronic illness risk.

The perfect health diet website isn't trying to sell you supplements but just make it easier to find what they buy for themselves personally, it's a orphaned health blog by a scientist couple I know personally that make their money elsewhere as researchers- they haven't even updated the blog in ~4 years. They wrote a very detailed nutrition book where they evaluate the risk/benefits of each common nutrient backed up by a deep literature review- basically redoing what the FDA did for the recommendations you cite, but with newer data. The other one is just a pop news summary of an actual journal article.

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