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Comment by dragonshed | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> "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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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).

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