Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)
ucsf.edu
ucsf.edu
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999...
If you have a randomized controlled trial, the sugar dose is varied and other confounding variables are controlled by randomization. So you measure the causal impact of sugar only. There are studies showing that.
With observational studies, if you have a dose-dependent effect, then that's good evidence (although not completely conclusive) of a causal relationship. This is what many studies do.
If you have a meta analysis covering many primary studies, and if those vary a lot of context (i.e. countries, year, composition of the population), and you still get a consistent effect, then that's another piece of support for a causal relationship.
The few studies that I've looked at seem to show a pretty robust picture of sugar being a cause, but there might be selection bias - i.e. we'd need an umbrella / meta meta study (which ideally accounts for publication bias) to get the best estimate possible.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors.
Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors.
This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research.
https://www.henryford.com/news/2025/09/vaccine-study-henry-f...
Because vaccines aren't all that profitable compared to other pharmaceuticals but produce disproportionate public good.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
This logic is faulty because both vegans and keto/carnivore people are selected for adherence to diets. If you can stick to either dietary restrictions, you can probably also not pig out on pop tarts or whatever.
Because processed food diet is IMPOSSIBLE to adhere to without gaining weight. Caloric restriction simply doesn't work - your body wants nutrients, not just calories. Which is to say, your willpower will fail sooner or later, unless you find a way of satisfying nutritional needs without excess caloric intake.
Keto diets might be easier to stick to than calorie counting or whatever, but the fact that you bothered with a diet at all means you're selecting for people who care about their health.
Either way you cannot be sure your selection applies to other people.
UPF is the new devil as far as I can see, alongside refined sugar.
Also the size and sugar contents of some fruits nowadays is just insane and many still think they're "healthy".
That doesn’t mean they have to be processed, though, or that it requires gaining weight along with them. I personally survive primarily off of clean meats and homemade sourdough bread (which has literally 4 ingredients). If I cut out the bread I get hypoglycemic after runs and pass out. And with it, my weight stays around the same (though I’ve lost maybe 30lb in the last year or so due to just running more and lifting less).
Edit: and when I say “clean meats” I do not mean “lean” meats. Plenty of saturated fats. My bloodwork and other vitals are probably the best my doctor sees all year.
Because these are often in conflict they must compromise something. If you find a way to be fat while: looking good, living a long life, and being able to do the other things in life you want through life people would be happy.
Of course being fat correlates strongly with things people don't like about living a long healthy life and so we try to lose weight, but that is only a proxy.
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.
Fraud etc.
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified.
Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
The general understanding at the time was basically a full stomach tells people they have eaten enough. We didn’t understand the multiple systems the body uses to adjust the hunger drive and how much a high carb low fat diet messes with them.
> I'm sorry, but this is simply nonsensical. Calories were EVERYTHING among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
Less vilified is on a relative scale, I was alive back then and there was plenty of nonsensical low calorie diets being promoted. However you also saw crap like the Fruitarian Diet where unlimited fruit meant people could actually gain weight on a diet that also gave them multiple nutritional deficiencies.
Low fat dieting is in part from that same mindset as fruitarian diet where it’s not the calories that are the issue but the types of food you were eating. Digging just a little deeper these ideas made more sense before global supply chains and highly processed foods showed up. Culture can be a lot slower to adapt than technology or economics, diet advice from your grandparents could be wildly out of date. Cutting X means something very different when you have 20 available foods vs 20,000.
See "carbohydrates", "complex carbohydrates", "integral grain" and so on.
Quite frankly, plain sugar from fruit is less dangerous than the complex carbs from grains. But fructose is still dangerous, just less so.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.
You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.
The same rule changes tightened the rules on added sugar.
If you are trying to have some reasonable balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet, pushing kids from whole to skim milk is going to move the diet towards consuming more sugar/carbs, even if you have a seperate rule trying to tighten sugar consumption.
You are making an argument that people do so, do you have any evidence for this ?
There is a negligible difference in glycemic index / glycemic load between the variations of M.F. milk products. Some analysis has skim milk as having a lower GI.
Unflavoured Milk is not relevant to the GI conversation.
Ok, there's no different.
Beyond that, Minor differents in glycemic load are irrelevant if you're consuming milk with a meal, like the kids in school are doing.
2% milk is a pretty good balance.
Read the slash as “or”, not “also known as”.
It did twenty years ago, when I noticed, I have not bought it since
The meal does not get smaller. The meal has a calorie target, and the milkfat gets replaced with new food. And almost never will that new food be a chunk of lard, so it will increase the carb ratio.
This is not accurate.
No they didn't "replace" the fats with sugar. There is a chocolate milk option, just as there was before, but all options need to be 1% or low M.F., which nutrition and medical science overwhelmingly supports.
Is chocolate milk not ideal? Of course. We all know that. They shouldn't serve it either.
That has been kind of a consequence of that though. Low-fat foods tend to taste pretty bland, so sugar is added instead to improve flavor.
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
Industry funded research? Results that disagree with the current consensus? Nutrition science entirely?
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-op...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben
> in every other industry that i can imagine
Our own industry (tech) is rife with unpunished fraud.
It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated. How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding? How many have been criminally investigated?
But being wrong isn't a crime. Intentional fraud is.
> It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated.
And it's hard to investigate without some reasonably solid evidence of a crime.
I’d say the Ariely affair is reasonably suspicious.
I am glad it takes more than mere suspicion for the government to go search my private writings and possessions.
the witness and reportee who i am friends with was directly instructed by this professor to falsify data in a more positive light in order to impress grant funders. multiple people were in attendance in this meeting but even that was not enough to see any disciplinary action.
duke also has a notorious reputation for being a fraud mill.
They also kept the grant money. The university investigating itself isn’t meaningful.
Is that not the reasonable response if an investigation didn't turn up wrongdoing?
What I've seen is that the best and most well documented way to prevent CVD is the DASH diet paired with exercise and potentially statins.
If you are an unhealthy weight you are both eating too much and/or not exercising enough. High calorie foods can be fatty, sugary, or both.
In a lot of ways, it's actually been easier. Because my blood sugar isn't crashing every few hours, I can easily skip a meal and feel perfectly fine. Fasting is very easy for me now, which it wasn't at all on an unhealthy diet.
Also:
- If you are eating more fish (as opposed to eating meat), you are likely consuming more mercury.
- If you are eating more fresh veggies you are probably ingesting more pesticides.
- If you are easting dark chocolate for its health benefits, you are also ingesting cadmium and other heavy metals.
So all the above should be done in moderation. Even things that seem like unalloyed good can be dangerous. A burst of exercise beyond your conditioning can lead to a CV event. Too much water can be poisonous. Some people get constipation for too much veggies in their diet.
For example, instead to sticking to a narrow faddish supposedly healthy diet, you can enjoy a wide range of foods, which will make it more likely you are getting all the nutrients that will do you good (of course clearly unhealthy food should be avoided).
The body is more complex than we can ever know. There are some general principles for good health (including CV health) that should be followed, but to me it is clear that good health does not arise from a slavish devotion to very detailed set of rules.
It'd be funny if lots of fad diets actually works because people are forced to eat a single type of food and that's entirely enough for it.
> "don't eat something obviously terrible"
This is an exact thought in the comment.
> "bad things can happen so why bother"
The exact thing I was arguing against.
Jeez, why bother responding if you can't be bothered to read the actual comment I wrote.
I cook my own food and optimize around eating healthy. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I made less money or had a more demanding job or didn’t have great grocery stores in a 10 mile radius or had to spend time in childcare or any of the other completely valid reasons people have.
Besides, you yourself just described “do things in moderation” yourself: holidays, Christmas, restaurants etc. That’s really what the philosophy is.
That is what I hate about the everything in moderation. We need to do better since some things should be in much larger amounts than others.
I think we all would agree that any amount of rat poison is a bad thing, thought perhaps this is too much of a strawman.
The main issue is overconsumption leading to overweight and obesity. Food that’s high in refined sugars and/or saturated fats tend to contribute to this, because it’s palatable and calorie-dense
So in that sense, yes - I believe that as long as your diet is varied enough that you get sufficient intake of all, or at least most, of the essential nutrients, and you don’t eat too much (i.e. in moderation), the ratio of macronutrients doesn’t make a big difference to your health outcome
The crux is that moderation is hard when the food is jam-packed with calories, and it’s so delicious you just want to keep stuffing your face
You have to restrict yourself to produce and a few scant other options to escape with balanced nutritional products.
They even advertise cereals as a "part of a healthy breakfast". Which is a lie under any circumstances, because it's never a healthy part if you eat it long term. (Yes it could keep you from starving to death in a famine, still not 'healthy'.) Imagine if they could only say "it will keep you from starving, and may significantly contribute to diabetes"
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus.
Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public.
More here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
For some people choice of diet really does seem core to their identity. It’s literally all the OP ever posts about.
There may be a misconception that there is one single best diet for everyone, when in reality we people (over generations) evolve with our diets, and your best diet and my best diet may be completely different.
The problem with using science as a guide is that there are just too many variables and not enough time, data and money to isolate them all sufficiently.
However that is distinct from the idea that too much of something like refined sugar might be unhealthy for just about everyone. So science does have an important role to play, I just don't think it's advanced far enough to fully answer the question for everyone.
You have to get your calories (ie raw energy) from somewhere. If you limit saturated fat to 10% then what's left for the other 90% is (roughly speaking) unsaturated fat, simple sugars, carbohydrates (ie complex sugars), and protein. In terms of long term habits converting protein to calories is probably not a great choice for your health. If you decide to go for complex carbohydrates over various oils then vegetables that provide those are a good option.
Your body can certainly "manage" on a high protein low fat low carb diet but I don't understand it to be good for you.
Technically speaking, dietary requirement for sugar is 0. This doesn't mean it isn't useful to have some, but it definitely shouldn't be the basis of the food pyramid.
Or do I want to live longer?
They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but different actions could result in different outcomes for each.
For nearly everyone, this isn't impactful to their life. Only their vanity
I'm not saying that ketosis has this kind of an effect, but rather that eating or not eating some other things might. Eg vitamin K2. The body is be able to make vitamin K2, but we might have stronger bones and teeth, and a healthier cardiovascular system, if we get extra K2 from an external source.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
rather like MSM eating its own tail, it's happening way over there and our lives continue irreguardless.
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right?
Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right?
In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle.
At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better.
Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. )
Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.
> the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars
I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.
As a unrelated note it really is depressing to think about how easy it is to buy off politicians and how much money the bribers have vs an average person.
~$6,000-$7,000 is the amount the researchers were paid off with in the mid 60s. This is roughly equivalent to ~$50,000 in 2016 when using CPI-U figures.
$25,000 in the mid 60s would be equivalent to ~$193,000 by the same measure, and does not relate to $50,000 in 2016 in any way.
But your core point that the items in the CPI-U basket do not adjust equally, which is why it's a basket in the first place. Median housing price in 2016 was ~$300,000, so ~$193,000 is a bit of variance... but not nearly as much as mixing the numbers from the different comparisons made it sound.
In terms of 2016, from gemini:
> In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.
> Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period
rendaw was pointing out the $50k in the article & parent comment was in terms of 2016 dollars, not that the mid 60s $25k in CodeWrite23's comment converts to $50k in 2016.
I.e. that the researchers would not be getting anything close to a house + charger + spare change for just half the $50k amount. They got more like $6k-$7k at time of payment in the mid 60s. Which is still a good chunk of change for the time... just not the amounts it was made to sound.
Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
Or spend $23,134,000 on all of the House and Senate.
How do you corrupt an entire government? One congressperson at a time.
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
That's over half a million, in today's dollars.
With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
> To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...]
So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
In this specific case.
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...
If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.
But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
High carbohydrate content causes sugar spikes, which leads to insulin spikes, and insulin spikes both a) cause hunger and b) promote storage of energy in the form of body fat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3894001/
Second issue is as I said lack of nutrients. Your body needs nutrients, and will force you to eat until nutritional requirements had been satisfied. Since processed foods have very few nutrients, your organism compensates by increasing dietary intake... which means increasing caloric intake.
Very traditional diets also tended to include lots of foods that are both highly processed and contain both sugars and fats, like cheese or sweet nut cakes. Paleo diets are a modern invention, and have little in common with the concept of what our ancestors ate. They often have deeply anachronistic ideas, like favoring raw foods, when the use of fire has been a core part of our ancestors consumption since way before Homo Sapiens existed.
Traditional diets however are still diets that came after the advent of agriculture.
People lose fat on calorie restricted diet. How will you get to it, either by counting them or by improving metabolism or by changing insulin levels, is a different thing.
Vegan or keto diet can both be calorie restricted, as much as any macronutrient mixture. However, it doesn't mean its sustainable. If you are hungry all the time, you can stay on the diet for some time, but not forever. Since insulin is the primary storage hormone, reducing it will make you less fat (just look at type 1 diabetics). We now know that carbs are the highest promoters of insulin, that fat has 0 influence, and protein some. We have drugs like metformin or GLP-1 that brute force some of it and they are working.
So, we know that sugar is mostly bad and that fat and protein are not. Ofc, some fats are bad for other reasons (by promoting inflamation) but that has nothing to do with obesity.
"Hungry all the time" is actually vegan thing, but plants have so few calories and pass through so quickly that vegans end up being skinny despite eating literally all the time.
Turns out, it is fats that produce satiety signals, and the effect seems to be by far the strongest with saturated fats, weaker with monounsaturated fats, while polyunsaturated fats actually induce hunger as strongly or even more strongly than carbohydrates do. The idea that "protein induces satiety" is a side effect of the fact that most (though not all) protein foods tend to be quite fatty.
You mean leafs, not plants? Cereals, beans, fruits and some roots have plenty of calories but your true fatty friends are all sorts of seeds and nuts. You also can buy their fat extract: oil.
But grains and seeds do seem to be quite obesogenic, yes.
I don't know Fruitarians but what you describe makes sense. However the vegans I know aren't "Hungry all the time". Some are skinny and some fatty but I wouldn't say the average are skinny, you wouldn't stare at their size if you don't know their diet. Might be a personal bias though, I don't know studies about vegans hungriness or BMI.
In general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is wrong in quality and quantity; you can't track enough people for the amount of time where supposed effects would manifest), there is almost zero control over what people eat (diets and available foods even considerably over a decade for whole countries, never mind within individuals), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid category, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree, and each again with different kinds in each category).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects, or the rare results of natural experiments / famines), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
Maybe it'll become actual science one day, but that won't be for decades.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.
Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught?
It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1]
1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
That's not quite what TFA says. Rather:
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx...
I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change.
Edit: The new guidelines are expected to be released today.
https://www.wfla.com/news/national/kennedy-wants-to-end-war-...
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition. That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
It is beyond insane that these are the official guidelines on what Americans should eat. Why would anyone defend them?
And to exclude it would imply that it cannot be part of a balanced diet. That would be misleading based on the predominate culture.
"I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here,"
I would suggest that you are not aware of the cultural background. The US was colonized by Europeans. Many cultures who immigrated also used milk, cheese, or other dairy products. It makes sense that the guidelines be based on the cultural background of the foods eaten in that country.
Also many Asian countries have nutrition guidelines that include dairy products, not to mention historical cultural foods that do include dairy.
The RFK jr version of the food pyramid now moves meat and dairy to the biggest section of the pyramid
We know far less about any of this than we pretend to.
Foreseeing such Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg has already made that one into a movie.
> In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose
Workshop sawdust would be a bad idea though.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
Maybe adults, but probably not the people who were taught the food pyramid - children.
Edit: changed the tense to acknowledge this was in the past. Thought that was obvious since the food pyramid was a thing of the past.
Parents of school-age children ranting and raving about how the school needs to stop doing X, when it hasn't been that way forever; and they cannot hear it, cannot absorb it, cannot stop talking about it. Something something childhood trauma.
And I don't think adults on a grand scale question it, or process nutrition labels.
Boomers in particular (who engrained Gen x and millennial diets) are most likely to follow grains (and margarine) diets.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
True, but not really more or less than a diet including animal products: in both cases they'll be good by varying the sources of macronutrients. In fact most long-term, healthy vegans don't bother bookkeeping what they eat. Some athletes and weight-loss seeker does but it's not particular to plant-based diet.
Vegan bookeeping is a common fallacy. A while ago I had an odd conversation with a doctor that went like that:
- It's complicated, you'll need to count everything ! - Is it different with animal products ? - Oh yes no count I advise 1-2 serve of red meat every 2 weeks, 2-4 serve of fish per week, 1 serve of seafood once in a while 2 serves of chicken per week, adjusted if you workout. Also 2 diary product per day but avoid salty cheeses too often or in large quantity. - I count 1 pill of b12 per day.
Approximately nobody has access to high quality leaf lard like the food blogs champion.
Nope. Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous. Nothing to do with Big Cow or any special interest lobby local to certain valleys in the USA. Except maybe Big Bacon Drippings, because if there's one thing better for a grill cheese than butter it's bacon grease (thick-sliced sourdough bread, sharp Cheddar cheese, a shmear of chili crisp)
Now, suet has been demonized to the point that nobody makes suet pudding any more. A shame, really.
Oily stuff tastes unctuous.
Butter is favored because most people had it in their youth. Some regions loves Nato and Chicken feet, others cheese and oysters. What's the most delicious? It depends of your own history.
I spread olive oil on my toast and prefer the croissants made with that as well. My favorite dish is fried tempeh.
You might be able to achieve something if you can somehow freeze your olive oil and chill your dough, and work very quickly during lamination, but you should, even with a lot of work and tweaking, still expect to get a noticeably inferior product for something like croissants.
Depending on how picky you are/not, you might still be personally happy with the texture and taste, but don't expect to get even remotely close to an actual good butter croissant, by more objective standards. Here in Canada we had a minor problem with the butter texture due to what we feed our cows here ("buttergate"), and this was preventing professional bakers from achieving quality croissants with just the Canadian butter. This should make you highly skeptical that you can get anything good with something as different as olive oil.
Still, I do love the idea of an olive oil croissant, it would be delicious.
I am thinking if an ideal butter croissant has some flaky fluffiness (perhaps if we define it as "trapped volume" between flakes), and we define this ideal flakiness to be 100%, then you can extremely easily get to 20% with just olive oil. Frankly I think you might even get close to 50% (defined in this way) provided you also start with a trustworthy recipe by mass and that aims for proper hydration (e.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/croissants-recipe-11863500) and work quickly with lots of chilling.
Just, subjectively, you might realize that 20-50%, defined this way, isn't much like a proper French croissant, and is more like a cheap doughy supermarket chain croissant—which I do still frankly enjoy sometimes anyway!
"Unctuous" is certainly not specific enough, the reason butter (and ghee) is so delicious is its butteriness, i.e. it has a highly distinct taste. All properly rendered animal fats have highly distinct tastes and serve different purposes. Schmaltz tastes slightly of chicken, duck fat of duck, lard of pork, and tallow of beef.
But butter does NOT distinctly taste of beef, rather, it is reminiscent of slightly-aged milk (or, in the case of ghee, it may even strongly smell like certain kinds of aged cheese). There is, also, in butter, significant absorbed water content, and, to my palate, even a very subtle acidity that is not quite present in other rendered animal fats that give it a sort of brightness that make it work in things like butter-creams and other delicate or mild flavours (e.g. popcorn).
It is IMO this specifically "non-meaty" unctuousness that is the real draw of butter. Not some childhood nostalgia.
Though my grandpa used lard on his bread in the great depression because they couldn't afford butter.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
Health policy decisions would ideally be based on some sort of evidence, not the quackery he spouts.
Yes, some of his changes are an improvement. Most aren’t.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5675784-kennedy-satura... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rfk-jr-upsets-foo...
It’s his food pyramid and his departments advice.
https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
As for him being a quack, that’s earned through his refusal to follow scientific guidance, and sacking the guidance available. You’re presumably aware of his views on fluoride and vaccines.
Vegetarians and vegans have lower T2D incidence on average FWIW.
Anecdotally, my dad tried vegetarianism for quite a while to address his T2D, but it had no effect. My mom cut out sugar and processed carbohydrates and her T2D was gone in ~3 months or so.
Following any diet is probably better than nothing at all, which could explain the lower incidence of T2D in that group vs the general public. I’d be more curious about the rates in vegetarians/vegans vs people who eat paleo or even carnivore.
Then it is of no interest
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13098-025-01890-7
Also, red meat isn't a known carcinogen. Processed meat is. And plaque formation in arteries is a consequence of inflammation... which is caused by sugar, a.k.a. carbohydrates. Insulin resistance is also a consequence of increased carbohydrate consumption.
But as I said, it is a combination of fats and carbs that is the worst killed. Eliminating either one of those from the diet leads to an automatic improvement.
meme, noun. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another -- WordnikWho knows, these guidelines might indeed be sensible, but anything labeled “Make America Healthy Again” has no scientific credibility.
it's crazy the us gov put this out and is still using kilograms for this formula
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
I agree with siblings that nothing jumps out (to my non-expert eye) as "very extreme".
EDIT: Removed long-winded snark after a more careful reading of the linked document.
The second order effects of not having to grow food for our food, and grow food for ourselves in the first place instead are probably too negative.
Reference? Many of the old studies have been proven flawed and, no surprise, corrupt [1]. Recent studies seem to suggest that it's only linked for some people.
Disclaimer: I am nearly uneducated with this topic, but find it increasingly hard to trust anything nutrition related, where big money is involved.
It's been nearly a year or two since I've looked into it, but basically there is a lot of money in marketing for the beef and dairy industries, and that includes lobbying and influencing the outcomes of scientific studies. It's worth scrutinising claims against the Ancel Keys studies soley based on the fact, in my opinion.
Her views are not the scientific consensus. She is not a scientist, she is a journalist with an agenda.
The dairy and beef industry can and do pool their money into paying for scientific studies [to show the results they want]. This manifested itself with a coordinated attack on the Ancel Keys studies.
So just reading meta-analyses saying the inverse is not going to help you arrive at the truth, when the well has been poisoned. I personally don't have the literacy to sort fact from fiction, but I know that cardiologists tend to believe the Ancel Keys studies. That's enough of a recommendation for me to believe it to.
Plus I was able to reduce my cholesterol from like 7.0 to 2.4 by eating high fibre and low saturated fat for about 6 months.
Modern science agrees that saturated fats lead to CVD, but replacing saturated fats with refined carbs also leads to CVD, which Ancel Keys didn't believe (though, to be fair, the populations he studied didn't have access to the types of refined carbohydrates we have today)
The dietary guidelines derived from his work did backfire, but Keys never said to replace saturated fats with refined carbs, which is what ended up happening. He advocated for substituting different fats. But the message that ended up being received was "no fat at all", which no scientist ever actually recommended AFAIU.
The diet he actually recommends is well studied, and found to be protective.
* Select a subset of diets that might fit your lifestyle.
* Make a list of categories you consume: refined sugars, all kinds of fats, gluten, dairy.
* Look for published papers on diets and categories.
I did a few dramatic changes throughout my life based on researches I did, not the hype. The first one was refined sugars for me and my kids - they didn't have a single cavity in baby and now permanent teeth. Pediatric dentist actually it's impressive, but little sugar here and there wouldn't harm with proper hygiene. One thing I learned about medical doctors is that they are not scientists, and unless they follow a protocol to diagnose and treat you, their opinion is often B.S. For adult, removing refined sugars reduced body fat percentage over time, but what's most important - lipid panel came to normal in about a year.
Hard to tell if it was gradual or not, I had one panel done 3 months later and it showed that all values are within acceptable range now, but very close to thresholds, and ~10 months later all values were just in the middle between min/max where applicable.
It's not new evidence, science or research that says you should reduce your refined sugar intake.
But I see a significant fraction my friends, family and students in university to have no clue. I recently worked with a student who shared his struggle with extra weight and asked about my gym habits. To his surprise I can't exercise except daily walk and I told that eliminating refined sugars is low hanging fruit. The student was surprised (early 20s) and didn't know how to tell if yogurt in cafeteria had added sugars.
I'm not recommending sugar; my point is that anecdotes mean very little for this type of general diet advice.
I wasn't that lucky and pure oral hygiene standards in eastern Europe didn't help as well. Had half teeth with fillings by age of 20. However, after eliminating sugars, no new cavities in unaffected teeth, just had to replace existing fillings and crown in 10 years.
Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
It was very promising in the exclusion phase - cutting gluten and dairy eliminated all the symptoms for 3 months. Per protocol I also excluded other things like nightshades, nuts/seeds, grains. But after 3 months, while adding things back, even in small amounts, one by one, got all the symptoms back, being more severe, and after excluding things again, symptoms are not going away completely. I think that our body is a very complex system, distributed in some sense, with delayed and cascade effects that are really hard to "debug".
Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.
To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').
I am currently reading The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.
A well placed warning label makes it a little easier to hear:
The one I like are the sodas that tout "made with real sugar" as if that's better for you than HF syrup.
Kennedy Flips Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat and Whole Milk
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/well/rfk-jr-food-pyramid-...
Kennedy said to avoid the sugary, processed foods that he labels as poisonous to health. (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Mr. Kennedy said (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
When Lucky Strike needed more women to smoke cigarettes in the late 1920s, it turned to Bernays.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.
Presumably "5 servings of grains a day" assumes no added sugar, otherwise it would say "5 servings of grains and some sugar a day".
Yes, but -
- Unless youre wealthy, it is difficult to get access to good bread. Far too much of the bread normally available has added sugar or similar products.
- Modern science argues even about the non-added sugar portion (the starches) and whether 5 servings of that was even good. Insulin resistance isnt just caused by added sugar, but just excessive starches (of which we were told to have 5 servings!)
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
Of course, you can get overweight by eating too much sugar, but it's really about not eating too many calories long-term, regardless of the source.
And of course, refined sugar isn't healthy at all and consumption should be kept to a minimum, outside of exercise.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
In general we really even barely have enough nutritional knowledge to say if the term 'good fats' even makes much scientific sense, but broad and vague things like "Mediterranean diet" are just total nonsense, from the standpoint of serious nutrition science.
Many people seem to disregard epidemiology, especially when it comes to nutrition (I think because it tends to support unpopular positions). But epidemiology has performed some excellent feats in the name of public health: cholera, smoking, pfao.
It is unfortunate that the large time-lines on these things make more rigor difficult, but I wouldn't throw out the epidemiology.
There are exceptions when there are rare natural experiments (e.g. I forget the country, but the European one where some issue caused all flour for the country to be only whole-wheat, which led to clear nutrient deficiencies due to the phytic acid there) but in general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is not just quantitatively but qualitatively wrong, and you can't track enough people nearly long enough), there is virtually no control whatsoever (diets and available foods shift considerably over just decades), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid taxon, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
But even setting that aside, you can't define or study "Mediterranean diet" rigorously even in RCTs, so I don't see how you can think you are going to get much of anything here from epidemiological work that is going to lead to anything practically actionable.
But all that aside, I don't actually follow a Mediterranean diet, and agree that one has to be careful here, because it is not well defined (or, it might be in some circles, but that differs from what the general population might expect).
The only reason I mentioned it was in response to
> The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat.
Where I was pointing out that the fats in the Mediterranean diet (by pretty much every measure of what it means to be a Mediterranean diet), are not saturated, and it is usually saturated fats that are considered "bad".
That is, all I was trying to do was clear up the (common!) confusion about fats (they are not all the same).
I also think it is better, rhetorically, to not draw support for the badness of saturated fats / differences of different fats by referencing the Mediterranean diet, since this rather looks like drawing upon narrow / weak science to support something that is in fact much more broadly supported by a larger variety of more careful work.
But yes, it is very important that people recognize there are huge differences here!
Also, the 7 countries study didn't just compare the regions, they also did intra-regional comparisons. Not that I think this particular study is what you should base all your evidence on, but, most others back it up.
The people who run these studies actually know what they are doing. They know the limitations of their methods, and, they have thought about confounding variables. This _always_ comes up in internet debate, like, "ahh, but there are confounding variables so the study must be trash!". It's literally their job to take those confounding variables into account. They don't just grab random people of the street to run these things. And I assure you, they know about the details.
Have to be a little careful with this claim. Dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are problematic either way.
The "well, actually" point on this is that dietary saturated fat drives blood cholesterol levels more strongly than dietary cholesterol. But it is not true that dietary cholesterol has "zero impact," and it is not true that "saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful." High-cholesterol foods are typically high in saturated fat, so these things are kind of intertwined.
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
… is a pushback of sorts on the sugar industry.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.
I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
Why neglect one aspect of our bodies digestive energy systems for just gluconeogenesis. Wouldn't you be better off eating a balanced meal of complex carbohydrates and unsaturated fats. Our bodies have multiple pathways to producing energy, focusing on using only one is silly and not the right approach because it wasn't designed to be that way.
Just because our bodies can survive doing a particular thing in the absence of another, doesn't mean that thing we're absent of isn't required.
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
Eat Real Food – Introducing the New Pyramid
Some other discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962750
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32978590
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183
and on and on...
A) Eating a pound/kg of fat
B) Eating a pound/kg of refined sugar
Sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
OP should have said for calorie-adjusted intake sugar is more fattening.
Unless your digestive system is hyperactive, a lot of this huge glob of fat will likely just pass right through without being absorbed into your bloodstrean.
The refined sugar is virtually guaranteed to fully hit your bloodstream and right now. It's enough to send some people into a life threatening diabetic coma.
After eating a pound of fat, you may want a nap but dying from it is extremely unlikely.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
Ketones can't be used for this purpose.
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120629041358/http://www.ers.us...
Oh hey right after beef CAFOs started dominating the industry.
Why? You've never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag?
There lies the problem...
The key to proper regulation is to keep money and influence from pooling at the top, making it difficult for any single person to buy enough influence.
As it is, we have a dozen monopolies that should be broken up that are making a small section of the population so rich they are essentially above laws.
But, proper regulation can exist if people want it, and more specifically in the case of the USA, legislators want it. Unfortunately, Dems actively prevent it, and republicans are ripping it down, so the rest of us are kinda fucked.
For example, if there is only one regulator for a country, the companies can pay millions to get it eased up for them, because they can make billions from it.
But if there one regulator for each state, they equation will change and it might not be profitable to pay millions to a regulator of the state, because they cannot make enough profit from selling in the state to justify it.
That is the only way to make it work. Rules don't work forever. Incentives do.
For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.
Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
But sadly, many order of magnitude more people would like to just make more money when invest. Which is why..
>Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built,
> rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take...
Capitalism does not imply public trading. Capitalism can work even when companies re-invest parts of their profits.
Oh no, that would be too slow. We want Speeeed...even if that means a quick descent into certain doom.
Blame them (the consumers) then. This is like that silly Reddit/Twitter stat about 10% of companies creating 90% of global emissions… which the companies are doing in the process of making the shiny cell phones and laptops all the consumerists lambasting them are posting from, plus all the plastic crap they buy every day from Amazon.
The consumers are the ones demanding unchecked expansion of their consumption. As long as that demand exists, companies will find a way to fill it, whether they’re doing so in America or other countries. Privately held entities can’t allocate capital fast enough to keep up with the consumerists.
America is one of few places that doesn’t.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
The fat mechanism I understand, but what is the mechanism for sugar in CVD?
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...
all simple carbs are the devil, but we can't possibly feed billions of people actually healthy food - organic vegetables, nuts, and animal products, so come drink your corn syrup.
And you can replace "sugar" in what I said earlier with "high-GI foods" and it doesn't change a thing. Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
how is it not dietary if consuming most carbs spikes your blood sugar for hours, which, with three meals + snacks + starbucks slurry, means elevated blood sugar 20+ hours a day?
1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins
2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls
3. LDL gets oxidized
4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques
5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.
Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.
It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all...
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
By Gary Taubes July 7, 2002
But sugar-sweetened foods contain saturated fat ... so ?
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Every health authority mentions both cholesterol/saturated fat and blood sugar as contributing factors.
The issue is more that people eat too much fatty food, a specifically unhealthy fats.
On the other hand sugar is probably never good for you and you should aim to reduce it as much as possible.
That's like asking "what's the issue if somebody salts the soup with cyanide, most of the meal will still be soup". Yeah, but the cyanide will still kill you, even if it is the small percentage.
the people eating "lean steaks" are fooling themselves. There's no such thing as "clean beef" it all has high amounts of bad fats. Are some worse than others? of course but let's not kid ourselves.
I'm not trying to say that red meat is good for you. I'm just saying we have no real idea, and you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot. Try things out, see if you can eat similarly to people you know who are in good health, and get blood work done regularly to see if you're ok. Probably avoid highly synthesized foods.
You are essentially hand waving away 80+ years of scientific studies and data because...you said so?
> you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot.
This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern.
Matter of the fact is that the entirety of belief that saturated fat "clogs the arteries" was based on the epidemiological studies which failed to adjust for other risk factors such as trans fat intake, intake of processed foods, and many more.
We should not throw away "80+ years of scientific studies and data" because... said "80+ years of scientific studies and data" do not exist. Not a single actual study had ever been made. The best we have are epidemiological studies, and these have massive issues.
"This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern."
It is not an insane take, you are just being a dumbass. Doctors do not have any training in nutrition. When I asked my doctor - doctors, actually, plural - for dietary advice, literally all of them told me "I don't have knowledge to advise you on that, figure it out on your own".
Science has basis in reality, yes. But doctors aren't scientists.
The reason for this is fairly simple to see: the methods of science that work so well in other areas of biology are completely impractical in nutrition because of
1. The difficulty of ascertaining and maintaining compliance with a specific diet for a long term study
2. The very long-term effect of some food choices
3. The unknown degree of inter-personal variance in food consumption
4. The expected low effect size of dietary recommendations
5. The huge variety of possible dietary effects
6. The huge amount of possible confounding factors in any population-level study
As you'd expect from this combination, the only effects we really have good science about are those that are relatively fast acting (e.g. salt intake increases BP in less than a day) or have very strong effect sizes (e.g. lack of vitamins or certain amino-acids produces severe diseases). For things like life-long effects, or even effects over multiple years, especially where the correlation is slight, you're left with very unclear science where the unknown possible confounding factors dominate any conclusion.
Edit to add: even today, there is a clear disconnect in nutrition science between people who advocate mostly for relatively simple guidelines and the avoidance of processed foods, usually recommending a preference for vegetables over animal-based products; and the older style of guidelines that you suggest, that say a grilled steak is much worse for you than, say, a stevia-sweetened granola bar you'd buy in a super market.
All that to say, the science isn't wrong, but the practicalities influence the advice.
However, some individuals suffer from a bad regulation of this homeostasis, and for them dietary cholesterol does lead to persistent high levels of blood cholesterol as well. So the guidelines should apply for them, but not for everyone else.
The measurement, control, confounds, and even basic concepts are atrocious here, this is possibly the only field as bad as or even worse than e.g. social psychology. And this is all ignoring the massive economic interests involved.
It is in fact only science illiteracy that would lead one to think nutrition science is a serious science. At the most absolute charitable, it is a protoscience like alchemy (which did have some replicable findings that eventually led to real chemistry, but which was still mostly nonsense at core).
I expect more of government though, and while I see the vague rationale behind hamfisted soda regulations, I remain deeply irked by the Fat Tax that Denmark once imposed. I offer no benefit of doubt and view that thankfully now bygone usurpation of the family table as unforgivable and implemented in full awareness of its flaws.
If one chooses to blame this on corporate influence and ignorance, then either way it exemplifies how easily fundamental aspects of our personal lives can be controlled based on deception.
Ain't sure about anyone else, but I certainly wonder how many other similar delusions we're subject to under such influence and "research'. I know of more than a few.
For me it begs the question of how and why we've allowed such centralized frameworks to persevere. Independent groups do exist, but then there's SEO, mainstream-media and all the other factors that make them practically invisible. And with abandonment of the Internet in favor of corporate friendly LLMs, I expect it to get worse.
But notice how "Sugar industry blames [saturated] fat for CVD" doesn't mean it's good for you. Their motive is to sell you sugar.
Just like finding evidence of the meat/dairy industry sowing FUD on saturated fat doesn't mean it's bad for you. Their motive is to sell you saturated fat.
We should instead look at our best converging contemporary evidence on how saturated fat impacts human heath outcomes, not wank off to blog posts like this.
To put it bluntly, jut eat maintenance calories with most of it coming from good protein sources and eat good amount of fibre. No, dietary cholesterol isn't gonna kill you, nor is sugar but obviously that doesn't mean you eat tons of them.
And the most important is enough sleep and WORKOUTTTT. 240 min of cardio and resistant training combined. Is that a lot to do?
Why do you need to optimize each and every aspect of each nutrition? "Oh, I don't eat meat because it is correlated to heart disease, so I consume dairy. Oh wait it isnt exactly digestible so I consume vegetables. Oh wait, I will have to eat like KGs and Kgs of veggies to meet the nutrient requirement. Oh wait, that means I am eating tons of carbs". How about you stop brushing your ego and just keep it simple by having a sense of number of calories you want and then eat enough protein from natural sources.
Yeah, for sure if you have any beliefs which prevents you from eating something then by all means find alternatives and have processed food. Processed food is not necessarily bad. Whey protein is processed but it is very important for vegetarians. What grinds my gears is this push to find the ideal diet. Vegans hate carnivores. Carnivores make fun of vegans for eating veggies. Like bro, shut up.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
no conflict == no interest
I agree about the need for more transparency and more peer review actually being done
And the fact that people do not care is just as, if not more, concerning.
This is how you get MAHA, which I support bc of this, craziness included.
why? the state does not need you to live past your retirement age. in fact, it's preferable if you don't.
If you think nutritional science is too unreliable, I can see that perspective. The conclusion then should be “I don’t know” not “trust the people who argue with psychological techniques instead of science”.