Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

A double blind, randomized, controlled trial showed that replacing saturated fat with seed oils high in linoleic acid significantly reduced cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.CIR.40.1S2.II-1

Unfortunately the full text of this study isn't on SciHub, but it's a very good study. They assigned veterans to one of two mess halls randomly, and in the experimental group they fed them food with the fat content replaced with corn oil (which is 46:1 omega 6 to 3 ratio). They also did a pre-study to make sure the fat-replaced food was palatable and hard to distinguish from unaltered food higher in saturated fat. The experimental group had significantly lower CVD outcomes and lower all cause mortality.

Don't worry about linoleic acid, it's either benign or healthy.

View on HN

Like for anything else in nutrition, it is meaningless to say that linoleic acid or any specific kind of oil is healthy or unhealthy.

Only when describing the complete daily intake for some category of nutrients it is possible to say whether the quantities that are used are healthy or unhealthy.

In most human studies it is pretty much impossible to feed all the participants with exactly the same food and to vary independently various ingredients over long times in such a way as to obtain a reasonably certain conclusion.

For instance, in most days around 90% of my daily intake of fatty substances comes from a mixture of 4 oils: 50 mL of extra-virgin olive oil + 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil (required to provide enough linoleic acid and enough vitamin E) + 5 mL Schizochytrium oil (provides enough DHA & EPA omega-3, can be substituted by 10 mL of fish oil, e.g. cod liver oil) + 1 drop of oil containing D3 & K2 vitamins.

According to the current knowledge, this mixture of oils is healthy.

Nevertheless, it is not possible to say that any of its components, e.g. olive oil or sunflower oil, are healthy in isolation, unless the total daily consumption and the total daily consumption of any other fatty substances are specified.

Where do you think our ancestors got their linoleic acid intake?

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

Where do you think our ancestors got their water? Certainly not highly purified and disinfected water straight from a water treatment plant and piped to their house. Should we go back to drinking from lakes and rivers?

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

You probably meant to call my argument an appeal to nature. You seem to really know your stuff.

>Where do you think our ancestors got their water?

Lakes and rivers.

>Should we go back to drinking from lakes and rivers?

Preferably yes. I came back from a camping trip yesterday where I strictly drank from lakes and rivers, and it's very refreshing compared to city water.

I suppose this wasn't the gotcha you had planned in your head.

You drinking from a lake has nothing to do with the enormous impact of poor drinking water on the human population.

You are free to do whatever you want, but ignoring well understood issues of the world over a single personal experience is the though process of a small child.

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fresh...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com