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Comment by lazerlapin | Hacker News Reader

> A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this.

I know it was just an example, but actually no, the role of dietary saturated fat as a factor for heart disease remains very much valid. I’m not sure which recent studies you’re referring to, but you can't undo over 50 years of research on the subject so easily. What study were you thinking about?

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>you can't undo over 50 years of research on the subject so easily

Sure you can if the research was bogus to begin with, sponsored in many cases, and merely taking for granted/referencing some previous results without verifying them, which is often the case.

You can undo 50 years of research easily, by this process which we call science.

Science is[1] impressive but does it have a method for resolving the numerous conflicting "truths" in this thread?

[1] except when it isn't, of course

I think they are referring to low-carb studies done recently. If your diet consists of only saturated fat, it does seem to be healthier for you than the standard American/Western diet that is also high in saturated fat but also quite high in sugar, wheat, and other starchy carbs. When combined, saturated fat and carbs are a hitting a double if your goal is to be unhealthy.

General disclaimers apply regarding portion sizes etc blah blah blah I'm not a doctor.

Anecdotally, a low-(ish) carb diet and fasting has done wonders for my health and many others. I will say that there appears to be a link with higher cholesterol when consuming higher amounts of fat, but the argument in nutrition science atm seems to be centered on whether or not that is "good" cholesterol, but it's hard to measure in human patients for a long time because you essentially need to put them on a very limited diet to get good data. Those large scale trials are expensive and hard to manage at scale.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/

Remarkable how easy it is to cling to propaganda

I wasn’t aware of the new debate over saturated fats, I’m curious and will be watching this evolve with interest.

That said, for me this publication has red flags right from the start. Complaining about difficulty of changing everyone’s minds is a political and non-academic persuasion tactic that does not convince me. Calling it “resistance” and “bias” is a bullshit framing that makes me less likely to trust Teicholz. Of course there is resistance to 50 years of publication and research, and there should be. There’s a lot of bias towards the earth being round, and a lot of resistance to the idea that it’s flat, right? If I repeat the claim that the earth is round, is that “propaganda”? It would indeed take time and effort to change everyone’s minds about that.

Multiple times she references “>20” papers that back up her claims. Except 5 of her references in this paper are her own. And she has around 10 on this subject. So is she claiming this “new consensus” is based on what she herself and maybe one or two other people believe? If 50% of the evidence for consensus is her own papers, then I doubt there’s any consensus at all. It’s funny to claim there’s consensus at the same time she complains that it’s difficult to change the consensus. Even 20 independent scientific papers not authored by Teicholz is practically nothing in the big picture. It will take many more papers and much more time, and the evidence needs to be overwhelming, clear, obvious, and true.

She might be right! But Nina Teicholz is a journalist, not a scientist. She does have a PhD, but her publications don’t appear to be scientific research, and most look like opinion pieces.

Out of curiosity, if saturated fats aren’t the culprit, what is? Looks like she does have one paper questioning sugar, so is she claiming sugar is the real cause? What if it’s the combination of sugar and saturated fats? Does that make her right or wrong?

It's amazing how many HNers link this charlatan's op-ed thinking it's evidence. Presumably you don't like linking to our best human outcome research on the subject because it never pans out well for saturated fat–not for atherosclerosis, not for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, not for glucose sensitivity, and so on.

So you link to the equivalent of a reddit post 'summarizing' the space. I see this link every week on here and every time, the person who linked it thinks they just had a mic drop moment like you.

I think discussing this topic with too much fervor is a waste of energy. Nutrition science is hard because performing valid studies at large scale is close to impossible, so I’m left performing an argument from nature, being that eating things that were invented decades ago might be worse for us than things we’ve eaten for millions of years.

Not everything on PubMed weights the same. As others have said, this is just a summary article by the Best seller author Nina Teicholz. Not only she's heavily sponsored by the Meat Industry (and I'm not vegan), but her best selling book title is "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet", yet in the article she declares "The author receives modest royalties on a book on the history of dietary fat recommendations and otherwise declares no conflicts of interest"...

Nina Teicholz being the distributor of this propaganda right?

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