Lol at all the people in this thread stressing out about their artificial sweetener consumption while disregarding all the other dangerous shit they do, eat, and drink.
Forest for the trees.
Forest for the trees.
It's better to teach people that there is no free lunch, and they should take care about the calories they are consuming, even if that imply reduce frequency of sweet foods, than sugar coating an equally bad alternative to make it sound like it's healthier.
2. "no free lunch" is a phrase we need to retire forever. Yes, there is free lunch, we do it all the time. That's why infant mortality was 50% and now it's 1 in 1000. That's just called progress, we make things better all the time. That's kind of what humans do.
I've known people who have diabetes eating industrial potato chips telling me they stay away from butter and eggs and red meat because of the cholesterol and saturated fat. It's backwards.
These are natural parts of real food that have been eaten in significant quantities by humans for many tens of thousands of years.
I haven't gone as thoroughly into the literature on saturated fat but I don't think I need to. The few studies I've looked at had basic obvious flaws. Saturated fat made up a big part of people's diets in many regions, long before the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease. Personally I've been "gorging" on it for ten years now and am in excellent health.
I did look at many of the papers used to say sodium is bad and found that that is not a valid conclusion from those papers. Of course don't overdo salt but the problem shown by most of the studies is probably with processed food which has a lot of sodium, not the sodium itself.
Yes there is: diets high in saturated fats cause heart disease in the long term. There's a lot of meta-analysis on this, it's very much established.
> Saturated fat made up a big part of people's diets in many regions, long before the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease.
No, no they don't. This is a common misconception.
High saturated fats come from farmed meat, which is a fairly new phenomenon. Game meat is actually typically very low in saturated fat, and high in unsaturated fat.
In addition, high meat consumption is a new thing. Past 100 years only. Pre-historic humans were hunter-gathers, but almost all their diet was carbohydrates. They ate upwards of 100 grams of fiber a day and little to no meat, because meat is quite hard to get. Even after that meat consumption remained low, up until the past hundred years where wealth and farming allowed high meat consumption.
But, even today, you might be shocked to know that most humans globally do not eat a diet high in meat. It's only the west.
Each time I've done this on a given topic I've found that the "established science" is making claims with certainty that are not really well supported. But I'm always open to learning something new.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39111551/
I don't know if it's the most compelling, probably not, but I just googled.
But, you should really be looking at meta-analysis. Because you can find a single study showing almost anything. If you look at a few meta-analysis you'd find that it's undisputed that diets high in saturated fat increase your risk of CVD. It's very well supported and we understand the mechanism of action.
The recommendation of the AHA has been to have a diet high in fiber and low in saturated (animal) fat for decades now. It makes complete sense: more vegetables, more fruits, more avocados and nuts, less red meat.
As an aside: there's other problems with red meat outside of the risk of heart disease. It's also a group 2A carcinogen, meaning it probably causes cancer. Processed red meats are group 1, meaning they definitely cause cancer.
None of this is to say that you're gonna die and it's terrible for you. But when it comes to diet you need to look at the whole picture and consider balance. Eating almost anything is fine in moderation proportional to how harmful the food is. For most people, it's enough to just use your intuition and not hyper-optimize. Eating a cheeseburger is fine, but you should also eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. If you're eating mostly cheeseburgers, milkshakes, steak... yeah that's probably not good in the long term.
What it does is suggest that eating more saturated fat in some people raises the LDL cholesterol metric, and others have showed a correlation between a higher LDL cholesterol level and heart disease.
This particular study doesn't make the claim that it's causing heart disease, but so far all the studies I've seen that are probably used in the meta analysis do the same thing. To interpret these studies as showing saturated fat causes heart disease is to use correlation to claim causation. That's the problem I saw with a cursory look at a bunch of the sat fat studies. Meta analysis is problematic because it takes dozens of these studies and makes a claim but when you go into the details the studies themselves either have major flaws or don't support what the meta analysis claims.
As far as moderation and all I agree. Though of course we disagree on which foods are harmful and those should be moderated down to a very small amount. I think moderation with some things - processed foods for example, and I include 99% of what is for sale in a grocery store that has more than one ingredient, is zero or very close to zero. I try to eat only things whose ingredients are recognizable as mechanically separated whole pieces of a single species.
I would bet if there were a study that watched a cohort eat more saturated fat than another and monitored health outcomes, they wouldn't strictly control for saturated fat alone, if you could look at exactly what everyone is eating, they'd probably have the one cohort eating fast food burgers and processed meats and dairy vs the other eating more vegetables - or something along similar lines that confounds the results.
A fairer comparison would be to have two groups both eating healthy / real food diets, but one uses canola or sunflower oil for everything and the other uses butter or coconut oil, and monitor total health outcomes over a longish period. It might not take that long even a year should show a difference. I've only seen two studies that tried to do that and both showed that though the LDL cholesterol was higher in the sat fat group, mortality was higher in the other group, but I'm not claiming they prove anything.