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Actually 'Heart disease rates continue to stay the same' should be changed to 'increased'

In addition to heart disease there is a whole bevy of metabolic disorders that are on the rise (type 2 diabetes, hypertension, PCOS, fatty liver, etc.)

In the 80s the government told us to reduce our fat and cholesterol intake, and research shows that we did a bang up job of reducing it. But why are we continuing to get sicker and fatter?

The nutritional recommendations of the US and most of the world has to be one of the larges and most unethical experiments of all time.

While I'm not in any standing to argue with you here, I'm wondering if the heart disease rise is with the same people that actually reduced fat intake. It's one thing to say SOME reduced fat intake, and SOME increased heart disease rates, but it's quite another to say those 2 sets of "SOME" are the same, or even overlapping.

Have these studies actually shown that those that DO decrease fat intake show no improvement in heart disease? (The answer may be "yes"; but I haven't heart that stated here; only averages.)

In short, yes. There have been quite a few studies that show that low fat diets have no bearing on developing heart disease.

But here is the rub. Most studies that show X,Y, and Z lead to heart disease are observational epidemiological studies. This means that researchers collect data from a number of disparate sources and attempt to make sense of it. The problem is that it is very hard to tease out confounding variables.

So I don't put much stock in this type of study. They have their value, but I wouldn't make any life decisions off of them. Their primary purpose is to help formulate hypotheses that can be tested experimentally.

When it comes to experimental tests, the lipid hypothesis has been shown to be wrong over and over. On the contrary, quite a bit of experimental data shows that a grain based, low fat, high carbohydrate increases the markers for heart disease.

Thanks. I understand that this sort of testing is damnedably difficult; at least for the types of answers we crave; "This is good, that is bad".

There are two big evils in American lifestyles: hyper consumption of sugar, and lack of exercise.

Americans walk a fraction as much as their grandparents every day, and consume several times more sugar. Worse, we consume insane quantities of high fructose corn syrup and its variants.

In the 1970s the US Government massively subsidized corn crops, which led to the creation of high fructose corn syrup. It's no coincidence our obesity epidemic really exploded from roughly then forward.

While I agree with the sentiment of your comment, this reasoning is greatly flawed:

Odds of a person having a genetic mutation where they are immune to cholesterol when most people aren't: low

Odds of a person choosing to make a documentary: low

Odds of a person choosing to make a documentary about themselves going on an extremely high fat diet for 30 days: extremely low

Odds that this same person just happens to be one of these people who is genetically immune to cholesterol....... REALLY?

You have calculated the odds of any given individual creating a documentary about going on a high-fat diet and having a genetic mutation. However the claim you are trying to refute is that this particular individual has a genetic mutation. Since this particular individual is known to have made a documentary about themselves going on a high-fat diet, you must instead look at the conditional probability.

It is likely that making a documentary about going on a high-fat diet is totally uncorrelated with having a genetic mutation. This means that the probability of this person making a documentary about going on a high-fat diet is divided out of the final probability, which reduces simply to the probability that they have a genetic mutation.

Of course it could be possible that making such a documentary is negatively correlated with having a mutation, in which case your point stands. However I highly doubt this is the case.

However it could also be the case that making such a documentary is positively correlated with having a mutation, in which case your point is moot. It is more likely that this is the case, as this particular individual may have known beforehand that his body dealt well with fat; also, other individuals may have made a similar documentary but never published it because the outcome (getting fat) was as expected.

Haha. You, my friend, are absolutely correct on all counts. My logic on those statements was indeed flawed.

Well, sure, but you're coming at it with the perspective that there's some reason the old worldview should be right.

Couldn't it be possible that you're like those that were arguing there was NO WAY the Earth could revolve around the sun?

The post was entirely about flaws in its parent post's reasoning. The flaws were correctly identified. What does this have to do with your assumptions about the author's perspective?

Because it is defending the status quo. Everything that was said is true, but nothing was said that didn't defend the old perspective. It happens a lot - you defend an opinion you had, and when you come up with some good evidence in your favor, you pretty much stop there. But if you had tried to see it from the other side, you may not have been so defensive.

Cultural/memetic inertia is really hard to overcome, mostly because of this I think.

Fat Head (2009)

BBC Horizon: Why Are Thin People Not Fat? (2009)

- both very interesting programmes that contain surprising amount of cutting edge scientific information.

- both demonstrate how the Lipid Hypothesis has effectively been debunked and it is only now that it has taken 40+ years for this to edge into mainstream, despite copious anectodal and historical evidence to the contrary.

- Fat Head, in particular, also attempts to explain why this enormous gap in science even exists.

If you really want to take the red pill, ask yourself why it took 40 years to gain acceptance, and then wonder if this process might be happening anywhere else.

This sounds like one of Peter Thiel's big secrets.

http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels...

See also this NY Times article about salt:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

The "eggs = cholesterol = bad" meme was apparently started by Lyndon Johnson, in an attempt to reduce demand (and therefore the price) of eggs.

I absolutely agree.

The problem these days is that easily digestible theories are now taken for fact. Because it's easy to digest and easy to transmit, they get spread very easily by the general population, even though they don't make sense.

"Eat fat, and your body turns that into fat. If you want to lose weight, then stop eating fat."

The funny thing is how violently people react when you explain to them that those theories are possibly wrong. My friend is "trying" to lose weight by cutting out the fat. When I tell her that she needs to cut carbs instead, she gets almost offended, and says that it doesn't work. Meanwhile, I lost 20 lbs in 5 months while on an aggressive South Beach diet (less than 100 g of carbs per day) and my cholesterol was extremely low.

When you look into the actual biochemistry of it, it really looks like the pathways that Atkins/South Beach diet talk about with respect to carbohydrates and blood sugar are the real culprits. The food we eat today is highly processed, and creates an over-balance of blood sugar, and that is the cause of why so many Americans are fat.

The food industry has found cheaper and more predictable ways of making our food (process the carbohydates into a fine powder, so that it's uniform and easy to cook with), but the side effect of this is that it causes our blood sugar to skyrocket and makes us fat because we are mostly sedentary (myself included).

The funny thing is that even the theories on cholesterol are coming into question. The absolute values of HDL/LDL may not be important, but some people are saying it's the ratio of HDL to LDL that matters. So companies like Pfizer that have been drugging people for years with Lipitor may just be extracting money from people with no real benefit.

"it's the ratio of HDL to LDL that matters."

Actually, from what I've read, the most important ratio is HDL to triglyceride levels.

The big question is then, if consumption of animal fats isn't contributing to heart disease, then what's doing it?

We've found heart disease in Egyptian mummies, so it's been with us as long as paper has been. Is it merely a side-effect of living? Even swine have been found to have narrowing of the arteries (http://vet.sagepub.com/content/19/6/676.full.pdf).

If it's influenced by what we eat, can we change our diets and affect it, or is it entirely genetic? Do dietary changes affect it? If so, does anything reverse it?

I agree, animal fats don't appear to be the single cause, but if they aren't, what is?

Highly-processed carbs cause a huge spike in blood sugar. The body balances this out by creating insulin which turns blood sugar into body fat, which is why Americans are so fat. Probably this extra body fat manifests itself into the plaque that clogs arteries.

Sleep, stress, and enormously increased sugar consumption.

Odds of someone choosing to make a documentary when they can dispute commonly accepted wisdom: pretty good

I haven't seen this documentary, maybe he started out thinking he'd prove that his diet was actually bad. If not, then I think it's pretty likely that this documentary was eventually made.

Now generalize that state of affairs to science at large: it ain't just the nutritional scientists.

To be fair, he might have decided to create this documentary precisely _because_ he has this mutation (I'm not saying that that's the reason why his cholesterol is low, or that this is good/bad), and therefore reacts abnormally to this diet.

Can anyone point to studies showing that dietary cholesterol is bad for you? Or even that serum cholesterol is bad for you?

Before you brush me off, I am aware that high serum cholesterol is a predictor of heart disease. However, a more plausible explanation is that the body manufactures more cholesterol to fight an impending problem.

See e.g. http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/04/12/statins-reduce-choles... for references.

(Analogy: if you can only look at the drain of a sink, you might conclude that water is likely to cause soap, because clean water almost always comes down before soap water does)

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/cholester... reviews some relevant literature in some posts, though mostly those go into dietary fat instead of dietary cholesterol. My tldr: dietary cholesterol is not a problem.

I find the China Study and Dr. Esselstyn's work to be far more interesting in regards to the results of a diet rich in the consumption of animal cholesterol and animal protein.

And I find Denise Minger's statistical reanalysis of Dr. Campbell's work to be quite compelling. http://rawfoodsos.com/category/china-study/