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Comment by jedrek | Hacker News Reader

The lipid hypothesis did it. The idea that fat and dietary cholesterol cause obesity and heart disease.

Here in Poland there are still many dishes that require lard as a cooking oil - "chrust" or angel wings, a friend pastry known all over the Slavic world is one that comes to mind.

Heavily salted lard, often with bits of bacon, apples and onion is used as a spread on dark bread. It's amazingly delicious, especially in the winter with some sour pickles. These are traditional winter foods here - salted lard would hold forever and sour pickles are a seasonal delight.

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That's only half the story though. It also helps that a P&G manager by the name of John Burchenal acqui-hired a way to cheaply hydrolyze vegetable oil, much cheaper than lard.

The money spend making crisco look 'healthier' than lard has left timeless traces in the general public.

The original form of crisco is so unhealthy that the now called trans-fats are banned in most countries.

However the damage is done, and people still look for other hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of animal fats. Like my friends buying canola margarine instead of real butter.

The dishes do not really require lard although it is indeed the most popular fat used in these recipes. The good old recipes used cleared butter rather than lard for dishes like chrust, pączki and other deep fried sweets.

The lipid hypothesis did it. The idea that fat and dietary cholesterol cause obesity and heart disease.

That's only half the story though. The factually wrong part (fat in == fat deposited). The other part, that is still factually correct and hence a good reason to avoid lard, is that saturated fats absolutely and unequivocally lead to atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.

I'm surprised how easily the 'bad' fats are getting a free pass in the name of decriminalizing 'fats', in the bleeding-edge of dietary pantheon.

> saturated fats absolutely and unequivocally lead to atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease

This isn't true at all. Too much saturated fat, perhaps, does, but this idea that if a drop of saturated fat crosses one's lips, you'll die a horrible death in 5 year is just plain silly.

That idea is just plain silly. And who exactly advocates it? It's just a plain, silly straw man.

Advocate that no, but I know people (ok a person, vegan),who I consider sane in all other bits of their lives, who believe the first half of that straw man (if not the timeline bit). Diet and health make people act completely nuts - and things you think are straw men are sometimes things people actually believe.

There are a lot of people, including myself, that disagree that saturated fats are unhealthy. If you read a book like

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet [1]

there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. There is a whole school of thought that polyunsaturated fats are the bad ones, while saturated or monounsaturated are good.

I'm eating a Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) diet, also known as keto (ketosis) diet, where I eat many saturated fats.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A25FDUA?btkr=1

It's funny that a 'mediterranean diet' is often touted as a way to encourage people to use olive oil and salads but that around the actual mediterranean cooking with lard is pretty standard, and they seem healthy enough.

http://befiteatfat.tumblr.com/post/24324936614/the-fats-in-t...

The mediterranean countries do largely use olive oil as the cooking fat, though they of course also eat other things. But olive oil is the default thing you cook with, in contrast to northern Europe, where lard and butter are traditional. The seven countries that consume more than 5 L/person/yr of olive oil are all conspicuously mediterranean: Greece, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, and Tunisia.

The linked article's claim that only Crete has this style of diet in Greece is strange, also. It's not even the part of Greece it's most associated with, let alone the only one that follows it (the region most known for its olive-oil cultivation/cuisine is Peloponnesus).

You're definitely going to be called a weirdo should somebody see you cooking with butter there. And at least in Spain as far as I know, even cooking with sunflower oil is frowned upon.

The protagonist of The Jungle is Polish. How popular is that novel in Poland?

Never heard of it before, sorry. Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle says he's Lithuanian and his name "Jurgis Rudkus" is also rather Lithuanian than Polish. I believe Lithuanians do not like to be mistaken for Poles, despite (or maybe because of) much common history.

Oops! I read that book twelve years ago, so the details are fuzzy. Sorry for the mix-up.

I do recommend it though; it completely changed the way I view immigration, labor laws, and capitalism.

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