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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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