Time to end the war against saturated fat? | Hacker News Reader

Time to end the war against saturated fat?

latimes.com

43 pointskareemm65 comments

It's several decades past due.

Robert Lustig, quoted in the article, gave a fantasticly informative talk which hit youtube a few years back, which explains the folly of the low-fat diet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Seems like Lustig's point is that a high-fructose diet is worse for you than a high-fat diet. We have replaced the fat in our diet with fructose, but that isn't necessary. We could just eat carbs low in fructose and/or more protein instead of fat. Regardless, this article is discussing saturated fat, which is a subset of all fats. "Healthy" oils like olive oil, canola oil, and many nuts have lots of fat, but very little saturated fat.

You gloss over the salient points in Lustig's presentation:

- A calorie is NOT a calorie.

- Fructose is a toxin; Liver hepatic fructose metabolism is completely different from glucose.

- A high-fructose diet IS a high-fat diet, due to how fructose is metabolized.

- The focus on saturated fats gave way to the low-fat diet, which is really a high-carbohydrate diet, which in fact raised incidents of cardiovascular disease, and increased the US's over all consumption of sugar.

- Lastly, the effort in the 1970s to try and control volatile food prices has yielded the cheap availability of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, and that has in turn adulterated the food supply in the US and other countries, where sugar is in practically every sort of food product.

These are congruent with the points raised in the latimes article. No good, and quite a lot of harm, has come from the focus on saturated fat, and the continued assumption that a calorie is just a calorie.

The science is there, but public opinion and public policy are all still stuck in the past.

Lustig's position is tenuous at best, and at times he either carelessly misleads people or outright fabricates points to support his little crusade. Here's (http://sweetenerstudies.com/sites/default/files/resources/fi...) a take-down of a number of issues, logical and factual, in his recent book, and here (http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...) is a critique of his underlying argument about the unique threat posed by fructose (plus some follow-up based on comments and Lustig's own response to that piece http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-...). Basically, even where Lustig is correct his points don't reflect any real-world situations.

> "Healthy" oils like olive oil, canola oil, and many nuts have lots of fat, but very little saturated fat.

Why do you consider those oils to be healthful?

Quotations were used around the word to indicate skepticism. Believe those are called scare quotes.

Maybe he meant healthier than other types of oils. E.g., olive oil is healthier than corn oil.

Healthy oils actually tend to have a lot of saturated fat in them. Nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, avocados, are all quite rich in saturated fats, and actually are good for you (no scare quotes needed). The reason those oils are considered healthy is because of the types of saturated and unsaturated fats they contain.

Canola, or rapeseed, oil is somewhat less certainly good for you. And is quite low in saturated fats; which is why it became so popular. It was a low saturated fat alternative to higher saturated fat oils. That was probably a premature optimization...a variable was optimized before the full effects of diet were understood. Grapeseed might be a healthier alternatve to rapeseed oil for high heat cooking (olive oil has too low of a smoke point for any serious cooking, it's more of a finishing oil, if you care about your health). I skip it, along with corn oil and soybean oil. I don't know that it's unhealthy, but I've been seeing evidence that it might be for a few years now. The evidence that it is more healthy than other oils has all but evaporated, however, so there's no reason to choose it over cooking oils that have more recent and convincing evidence of their effect on health.

I was of the impression that rapeseed oil was unhealthy compared to e.g. extra virgin olive oil, due to the common processing methods used to extract it (heating, chemicals[1]). Extra virgin olive oil is extracted purely by mechanical means, no heating is allowed.

Here in Sweden, however, it's easy to find and buy organic cold pressed rapeseed oil. I'm of the impression that this stuff is a lot better for you than "canola" oil.

[1]: http://wellnessmama.com/2193/why-you-should-never-eat-vegeta...

I'm not sure, actually. My impressions on canola/rapeseed oil are quite vague. But, as I understood it, traditional rapeseed contained unhealthy acids and that canola was a modified variant to reduce those acids (thus the name: CANadian Oil Low Acid). Rapeseed, as far as I know, is always unhealthy, no matter how you process it. Canola has been made less unhealthy but is probably not as healthy as many alternatives, such as grapeseed oil (which has a fat profile somewhat similar to olive oil, but can be used in high heat cooking as it has a very high smoke point).

> The evidence that it is more healthy than other oils has all but evaporated,

I'm not sure how you reach that conclusion.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23939686

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/2013/10/25/...

Those articles don't seem to talk about canola/rapeseed oil, at all. They seem to cover olive oil, which I stated is thought to be a health oil. Am I missing something?

Or, was my parenthetical comment about high heat cooking with olive oil confusing? I was speaking of canola/rapeseed oil when I said the evidence that it is healthy have all but evaporated. Olive oil is great, but burned oil is carcinogenic. Olive oil burns at a quite low temperature. So, cooking in grapeseed oil is probably a better bet, and adding olive oil toward the end for flavor.

> I was speaking of canola/rapeseed oil when I said the evidence that it is healthy have all but evaporated.

Ah, sorry, I mis-read you.

But why do you believe you should minimize fat, saturated or otherwise, is bad for you, and that carbs (low in fructose) are better?

See e.g. http://blog.sethroberts.net/2013/10/25/saturated-fat-and-hea... for a different perspective (including some references)

I said, "We have replaced the fat in our diet with fructose, but that isn't necessary. We could just eat carbs low in fructose and/or more protein instead of fat." Could, not should. I personally consume a lot of fat, probably more than most, usually in the form of nuts and some oils. I keep my refined sugar / carb intake to a minimum, and not because some article or organization tells me to, but rather because eating a diet full of refined sugars / carbs makes me feel lousy.

I think a bigger war to end is that against carbs. The paleo diet trend has gotten out of hand, everybody's afraid to touch bread now. There's evidence both on a large scale (population wide - there are countries like Italy where carbs are abundant in the diet, and others where fats are more common) and in controlled studies, that your carb-calorie to fat-calorie intake ratio makes little difference to your overall health as long as you're getting both, along with protein.

Yet we have a group of people focusing religiously on minimizing carb intake and preaching to everyone about it. Am I seriously going to live an extra 20 years of youth if I don't eat delicious sandwiches for lunch?

Paleo is a bit different from normal low carb considering you are eating fruit. Maybe you are talking about LCHF or Keto?

(Layperson understanding of the issue follows here, proceed with care) Carbs are not bad per se. Sure, big amounts of sugar are and a diet mainly consisting of carbs is probably as well. Italy is a nice example of a country where olive oil is abundant in their diet as well. What I think is the #1 advantage of Keto etc. is that you have no choice but to have a better look at what you eat (same with Paleo) as all the unhealthy, heavily processed stuff is simply not allowed anymore.

I actually started with Keto because I thought it was a cool diet hack that tricked you into not eating the stuff everyone with knowledge of diets was already telling you not to eat (the whole "fat is bad" for you has already been on a decline for some time now).

But Keto is not telling you bread is bad. It's telling you for the purpose of this diet it's bad. And the purpose is calorie intake reduction by eating bigger than normal amounts of fat which are supposedly more filling. And at least for me I can second that. I counted calories a bit before starting Keto and a week while doing Keto. My intake was severly reduced while eating as much as I wanted.

Also; moderation.

You might, because two slices of white bread spikes your blood sugar higher than a can of full sugar coke http://quittingsugar.com/2012/07/11/bread-and-coke-smackdown...

Since you're nitpicking, a sandwich isn't just two slices of white bread.

I don't think that a documented, reproducible very high blood sugar spike is nitpicking. I personally think it is reason for concern.

But you are absolutely correct, a sandwich is more than that. The author acknowledges this as well. It would be a fun thing to measure your blood glucose against (as I intend to). From an armchair perspective, the other ingredients in the sandwich may slow down the glucose dump into your bloodstream, but it will likely still dump the same amount, because the bread is still present. Along with the fat storage mechanism that glucose > insulin turns on, the extra ingredients may be more likely to be stored as fat.

I'll respond to this as soon as I complete the experiment!

This is anecdotal, but I've now lost 20 kg with a ketogenic diet. Started at 110 kg, I now weigh 90 kg after 5 months. I've complemented the diet with a regular amount of exercise (mostly running).

If anyone is interested, http://www.reddit.com/r/keto has a nice community of ketoers.

This is anecdotal, but I've now lost 40kg with a mix of diets, none of which involved worrying about ketosis.

Do you think that since minority opinions tend to foster a community around then, this also biases people toward minority opinions?

ketogenic diets have been shown to help a variety of conditions, obesity on one hand, and epilepsy on the other (although, as far as I know, the mechanism is unknown)

It's interesting how much diet affects people.

There's also a diet for Autism/ADHD/.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free,_casein-free_diet

from TFWA

>In their report, the AAP found that they could not recommend the use of special diets for children with autism spectrum disorder because of inadequate evidence.

> A 2008 systematic review from the Cochrane Library indicates that a gluten-free and/or casein-free diet has not been shown to have any effect on the behavior or functioning of individuals with autism

> The systematic review, conducted in 2009, concluded that the results "reveal that the current corpus of research does not support the use of GFCF diets in the treatment of ASD.

I don't know what TFWA or AAP are, but those statements are quite useless.

If you have a child with those problems and you want it to be healed, of course you can just try it for some months. If it works great, if it does not what did you lose? Not eating diary/grains is not that hard.

(And there's clearly a lot of information on the web about this diet and autism, so it must work for someone)

Might as well try prayer healing too. If it works great, if it does not what did you lose?

Bad comparison. Don't underestimate the power of the placebo effect :-)

But seriously: Say you are suffering some problem. You would not do something because scientific sounding entity x and y say a solution to this problem does not work, but a lot of other people say the solution works? That's not logic/sane behaviour.

When you delete the word "sounding" it becomes very rational behavior.

Not going to argue with a stranger on the internet.

Rather I'm gonna go out for a run.

So you only respond to people who agree with you and dismiss anyone else? That's pathetic. Enjoy your run.

No YOU'RE a towel!

it's interesting to watch the saturated fat debunking come into mainstream media. Most people who are deep into food research (I don't like to say "nutrition" because it's such a loaded term now) reading many modern studies, books, and blog posts, already know that saturated fat is good and healthy. Both the comments here and on that article show a good deal of naysayers, and how powerful public opinion is.

These doubters seem to have the most basic "common knowledge" explanation of saturated fat: Sat.fat raises cholesterol, and cholesterol clogs your arteries, and clogged arteries lead to heart disease. If you think this chain is how your body works, you should know that it isn't nearly the entire story, and not accurate.

50% of every cell membrane in your body is saturated fat. Your body produces 75% of the cholesterol that it NEEDS to operate, the rest comes from diet. Why does your body produce cholesterol and what is its purpose? That would be a good research starting point if you are still anti sat.fat.

Of course, you shouldn't trust articles on science reporting. You shouldn't trust me. You should read studies and analyze them yourself. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

There are probably thousands of articles on the topic.

I'd there any reason we shouldn't just accept the opinion of the FDA or AMA

The same reason you should not accept the TSA's opinion on security, or the FED's opinion on economics, or the DEA's opinion on marijuana, or the NSA's opinion on information security, or the SEC's opinion on market manipulation.

They are not working for you; while they try to avoid uprising, and that often does correlate with what is good for you - they generally care more about the profits/benefits to themselves/supporters/friends/industry.

Somehow, it is clear to almost everyone on this forum about the TSA and the DEA, to many (but not all) about the SEC - but almost everyone believes the FDA and FED are "the good guys". (The NSA switched sides from good to bad recently thanks to Snowden, I believe).

But there's no difference. Regulatory Capture has happened in all of these. Follow the money trail and the revolving door with the industry.

You just blew my mind. ;)

or the IPCC's opinion on global warming...

I haven't been following them recently, perhaps they are a little more dependable now - but in the late 80s they had reports saying a lot of coastal cities will be flooded by 2000 if we don't do anything. We didn't do anything. Nothing happened - but in 2008 I looked and those early reports mysteriously disappeared.

Yes, climate does change, for sure, and it's probably bad - but so many of the climate scientists were wrong in their predictions from 30 years ago, that they need to do more to be convincing with their predictions for 30 years from now. And the data crunching they are doing, every time I looked at it, is not convincing.

I agree with you - I hate the "the science is decided" or the "economics is decided" argument for any of the examples you mentioned. Whether it is saturated fat, sea level rise, or quantitative easing, one should maintain a healthy skepticism.

Should we listen to the government bodies and medical organizations that give us nutritional guidelines? This is a hard question to answer. I don't think anyone doubts that these bodies have good intentions and have our best interests at heart. But there is an obesity epidemic going on in America and spreading to the world, which has lead many people to question common nutritional teachings. Some people think we're just exercising less and eating more potato chips. However, those who are truly curious and go out hunting for information find evidence that contradicts the advice of these organizations.

We can see that slowly people are agreeing with the other side. They aren't doubting for no reason, evidence is coming from science and analysis of history. Really, you have to read studies. Science reporting is rarely accurate. Once you find the bad science that has lead to our current common knowledge nutrition, and how we got our current recommendations, you may doubt the advice of these organizations.

I am not saying don't trust them. They are working in the name of science for a good cause. But you have to be informed, and if your informing leads you to find doubting evidence (like it already has for me, some doctors, and many laypeople), then you can make your own decisions.

Before jumping to conclusions based on an opinion piece of one researcher, I would suggest looking at the article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovascula...

+1 for keto. The wife and I have lost 20 lbs each in the last 3 months.

Congrats. Just like a determined programmer will do well with any language/platform, determined individuals will realize their health goals regardless of which fad diet they are currently utilizing.

Indeed he will.

But a good diet or a good language/platform may help in realizing your goals by not burning your willpower.

A corollary to this law is that bad programming languages/platforms make you fat.

Let it be known as JanezStupar's Law.

I have noticed that there are superresponders to various diets. I am a person that when cuts the starch and sugar could double the caloric intake and still lose weight.

Seems that we are in multimodal distribution so the search for one size fits all weight loss regimen is doomed.

I have seen people succeed with:

Fasting (my first weight loss was that way)

Extremely low carb

Just training

Shocking life event (divorce etc)

The Pill - a friend of mine was quite fat until she started contraception and she thinned a lot for a year. Without dieting.

As long as the fad diet isn't too crazy. (You won't lose weight on a caloric surplus, for example.)

Is your statement true? Why should it be a forgone conclusion that our bodies are able to convert all macronutrients into energy with 100% efficiency? If you maintain a stable weight for 1 year does this mean you managed to perfectly balance caloric intake with caloric expenditure? That when you ate that extra cookie or drank an extra soda that you needed those calories to offset some energy expenditure? That seems hard to believe.

One interesting question that I do not know the answer to is the kinetics of metabolism for different macronutrients. How quickly can our bodies metabolize fat, protein, and carbohydrates? Is it possible that our bodies convert carbohydrates into energy very quickly, thus leading to an excess of energy that gets stored as fat? While other nutrients get digested much more slowly and only used if needed?

The basic question is do all ingested calories get used? Does the body have a mechanism for maintaining a certain "ideal" weight that can function across a range of caloric intakes?

The calorie labels you see on food are adjusted to account for average digestive and absorptive effects for the mix of macronutrients in that food.

Calories in - calories out doesn't mean "Calories on food label minus readout on the treadmill". It refers to the actual energy balance. Under no reliably observed circumstances has human biology been shown to violate the conservation of energy and matter.

The point of repeating "a calorie is a calorie" is to reconcile people to the inescapable fact that a caloric deficit, no matter how imposed, is the necessary and sufficient cause of lowered long term average body mass.

The problem is that some folk like to embrace Nirvana Fallacy as some kind of debating trump card. "You can't calculate future weight down to 1 gram resolution 6 months from now, therefore your premises are totally wrong!"

Well I can't predict the temperature in my bedroom exactly 6 months from now either. But I have a pretty good idea of what season it will be.

One trivial stabilizing mechanism is that more bodymass needs more power even at rest. So if you were perfectly balanced now with your current diet and current weight, and added the same snack every day, the only change would be a slight one time gain in weight.

Different foods make you eat more or less, by eg filling you up faster or keeper you satiated (and satisfied) for shorter or longer. So if you want to test your hypothesis, you'd have to carefully control for these effects, in order to rule out that caloric input is king. (I.e. my null hypothesis here is that caloric input is what counts in the end, but different foods have an influence on how many calories you actually consume.)

Anyway, the caloric surplus was just a simple example. Perhaps a clearer example would have been `trying to gain weight through fasting'.

I guite enjoyed the recent series of posts on gnolls.org "a calorie is not a calorie". I was quite convinced before that calories in has to equal to calories out for a stable weight, now I'm quite far from being sure

First article in the series:

http://www.gnolls.org/3374/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-calor...

Caloric surplus is meaningless. You are not a 4 phase combustion engine.

A lot of foodstuff a person ingests get used for other things - building, repairing tissue, making proteins and all other stuff that people need to be alive except oxidation for fuel.

That's why it's a surplus. You need a few calories just to stay alive and not slim, and that inclused repairing tissues etc.

Not sure if this comment is facetious or not, but Dr. Peter Attia switched to eating 5,100 cal/day ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3E0pFl370Y 11:19), mostly sat fat, and goes from 195 lbs (12:26) to 170, with the only weight lost being fat. Calories aren't calories.

I think it is well established that you are better off with saturated fat and cholesterol heavy foods if it means no longer being obese. Since compliance with any diet is so important, it probably is healthier for people in general to not worry about saturated fat and worry more about sugars and carbs and keeping weight in check. But that doesn't mean saturated fat in your diet is an ideal you should aim for.

I'm partial to this explanation:

http://www.mprize.org/blogs/archives/2010/01/hi_dr_feinman_a...

>What I think we're seeing is exactly the divergence within these populations that you know: that carb is really rather bad for overweight, insulin-sensitive people, such that replacing it even with SFA is relatively harmless -- whereas for lean, insulin-sensitive people, SFA (and dietary cholesterol, its fellow-traveller in omnivorous diets) is likely more relatively harmful, because carb is less able to derange the metabolism. We have to remember that any time we look at these studies and see only modest or borderline-significant effects: 66% of the US population is overweight, and half of that majority is obeese; Europe is somewhat better-off, at 49.8% and 13.3% in men and 36.0 & 13.5% in women per MONICA. So the deleterious effects of any nutrient with a differential effect on low-BMI, insulin-sensitive people will tend to be blunted by the much larger number of people for whom such effects are blunted by their "larger" problem.

>It also means that the deleterious effects of a rise in SFA intake are at least temporarily outweighed if it is is part of a dietary shift into a lower-carb diet when it is successfully used for weight loss (as opposed to just being a person's self-selected default diet, which of course is what's going on in teh studies in Jakobsen and in the Swedish, Greek, and US Nurses low-carb/high-protein studies). But it's reasonably clear that if you're insulin-sensitive -- which, interestingly, is what one is likely to become after losing weight on a successful low-carb weight-loss diet! -- the effects of SFA become more relatively harmful as teh deleterious effects of carb recede.

>t the end of the day, we have to go with what we've got. Until we get a couple of thousand healthy twenty-year-olds locked up in metabolic wards for sixty years or so for a really vigorous diet trial, I think saturated fat AND carbs (especially starchy carbs) stand out as things to reduce in the diet, in exchange for vegetables, fruit, lean protein, and PUFA (and probably MUFA) as things to maintain or increase. And most people should lose weight!

Comment thread from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6623205

Saturated fat intake has been suggested by some studies to be positively correlated with cancer risk [1]. I don't have an opinion on the quality of the evidence, but it's worth considering. The article doesn't appear to mention cancer risk at all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Cancer

Everything gives cancer according to scientists. Also everything protects from one according to other bunch. We die from cancer mostly because there isn't much left to die from - the medicine is keeping all the other stuff in check pretty well lately.

tl;dr: we don't know shit about the human body.

And government lunch programs want to serve only low fat milk http://frac.org/highlights-healthy-hunger-free-kids-act-of-2...

We give government too much power. Parents should decide what kind of milk their kids should drink. Or let the kid decide.

Yes, government tyranny in action, giving federal funding to qualified after-school meal programs operated at a local level that provide free skim milk to hungry children.

Why are they forcing unhealthy skim milk?

Yes, I take all my health advice from newspaper articles summarizing single journal articles.

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