Before anyone gets too excited, best to remember that Nina is regarded as something of a joke in nutrition science circles, and tends to take poetic license with the truth.
I cannot comment on Nina specifically, since I’m not familiar with her work. I’d only like to suggest that being “a joke in nutrition science circles” in the recent past is probably something of a compliment. Mainstream nutrition science led to advice such as putting energy-dense grains at the bottom of the food pyramid, and villainizing fat with respect to CVD, leading to “reduced fat” alternatives which instead use sugar (which is highly addictive). Now, debates center around how much added sugar should be the recommended daily amount (hint: it should be 0). Lawmakers are considering funding overpriced Ozempic via Medicare to fight our rampant obesity, while nutrition science has abdicated its role in helping people maintain healthful, satiating diets.
At least in the United States, the nutrition science of the last 100 years has overseen the most incredible deterioration of metabolic health in human history. There are some folks doing good work out there, as there always have been, but listening to mainstream nutrition science as if their word is law is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
Adherence to guidelines is laughably low in the developed world.
The recommendations regarding fat hasn't changed in 30 years in most countries. FDA recommended limiting saturated fat already in 1980 (didn't bother looking further) and has recommended not exceeding an energy intake from fat over 30% since at least 1990. 30%e from fat is not a low fat diet.
The guidelines from 1980 explicitly mentions reducing saturated fat and sugar.
I think the problem is that we haven't been listening.
The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.
Reduced fat is an interesting one. If you actually look at what Keys was investigating all the way back in the mid 20th century, the hypothesis was always that saturated fat increased CVD risk. The translation of that into policy and marketing aimed at total fat cannot be placed entirely at the feet of mainstream nutrition science.
As for added sugar - again, you’re labelling policy decisions as nutrition science. The DGs that I’m aware of recommend as little added sugar as possible, but when you’re making policy you have to strike a balance between strict enough to make a difference, but not so restrictive that no one listens. That’s different from what mainstream nutrition science would claim (which is indeed that there are no benefits to added sugar and several risks).
The same point applies to your claim that nutrition science has a role in getting people to adhere to satiating diets. No, nutrition science is to help us understand what those diets might look like. It is not responsible for getting populations to adhere to them.
> I’d only like to suggest that being “a joke in nutrition science circles” in the recent past is probably something of a compliment.
This is the fallacy that makes pseudoscience thrive right now: The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Wannabe influencers position themselves as the anti-establishment position. People who are frustrated with institutions blindly fall in line behind them.
The fallacy doesn’t stand up to even the simplest critical thinking, yet it triggers something subconsciously that leads far too many people to see a contrarian statement and assume it must be true.
Meanwhile, these people are grifting away, selling books and pitching Athletic Greens (or the latest sponsor of the day). This person is no exception.
with regards to who you follow in nutritional circles, just beware that there's a lot of social media content out there by people who are really good at business (seo, social media content gen, etc) but haven't read much nutritional research. Meanwhile the real scientists who know a great deal, have very little social media content, if any at all.
Personally, I follow the advice of Dr Micheal Gregor, one of his most recent books has over 13,000 citations! Their team has read over 20,000 nutritional papers!! And he'll tell you that whole grains and beans are an excellent staple of a healthy diet.
And with regards to Saturated Fat and even dietary cholesterol, he said, to make a really long story short, that they're really bad for you. There's way too many specifics to list but his 500+ page book (How not to age, and How not to Die) goes into great details and backs it up with a ton of research.
Personally, I don't think the capitalist-driven agenda anywhere in the world gives a flying fricative about the health of anyone, only the health of the profit motive and it's benefits to shareholders. Food and healthcare is but one more example. Love or hate the JRE, I think this episode [1] provides much food (pun intended) for thought. The common person simply does not matter other than as a(n) (addicted) consumer.
> they have a unique feedback mechanism that suppresses endogenous cholesterol synthesis that most of us don’t have.
What unique feedback mechanism is this and how can i find out if i have this too ?
circular reasoning "what makes them different is that they are shown to be different"
> they manage to escape heart attacks because their vessels are larger than average. Wow. I don’t know what to make of the Masai, except that they are indeed a unique people.
Maybe they are not "unique people" and there are other non-genetic reasons their blood vessels are larger.
I call BS on this so called review because author didn't bother to explain his points.
If you’re discounting a rigorous and well-referenced critique solely because it’s on a “spamtaculous” cite, then my intuition is that either you’re a motivated reasoner and nothing would push you off your position, or your epistemic framework for deciding what is credible and what isn’t is so wild that trying to discuss this issue with you would be like trying to teach French to a dolphin.
Just read the critique, ignore whatever “spamtaculous” things you’re seeing on the site. The content of the review is what we should care about. Happy to discuss that.
It’s large and I’m about to go to sleep and only on my phone, so not easy to go through the whole thing, but in short, yes.
Much like in her book, Nina is grossly misrepresenting the evidence, and I’d say just flat-out lies or at the very least misleads the author. See my comment here for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41958014
Some journals are. Others like to carry these kind of articles because heterodox controversial views like this can generate publicity, traffic and citations. Some journals will just publish any old rot.
The essay you linked to reads an awful lot more like a joke than the article in the OP.
To me it’s no secret that the mainstream nutrition science is a joke. The latest Nordic nutrition guidelines I’ve heard of recommend the same amount of sugar and red meat per week — 350 grams.
If that’s not enough to tell you everything these organisations do is based on false premises, I have a bridge to sell you.
> The latest Nordic nutrition guidelines I’ve heard of recommend the same amount of sugar and red meat per week — 350 grams
Please provide a source. The Danish health authorities absolutely do NOT recommend sugar consumption. Instead, they recommend eating 600g of fruits and vegetables, 100g of legumes, 30g of nuts, and 90g of whole grains DAILY, as well as 350g of fish and no more than 350g of meat WEEKLY. Source: https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/Media/638651862095615836/AOK-a...
> Before anyone gets too excited, best to remember that Nina is regarded as something of a joke
Hi KempyKolibri. Was this intervention so important that you needed to signup for HackerNews for the first time to call her a joke ? I think this is quite against this forum guideline but (unsurprisingly) you are being upvoted.
Nutrition science is hard. The effects are long-term and easily confounded by all the other things one eats. Randomized controlled trials are not easy to pull off. It's only loosely regulated and and a big market. And everyone eats, so everyone has an opinion.
Perhaps that's why there is a lot of sketchy results, hyperbole in communication, and a cycle of debunking (of the debunking) around.
I have been deeply involved with monitoring my diet and nutrition for almost 40 years now.
My own metabolism and body is so different than when I started 40 years ago.
Current nutrition "science" is basically studying ensembles of weakly nonstationary processes and arriving at meaningless averages.
The whole method is completely stupid. It is why it feels like we have basically learned nothing in my lifetime in this field because I honestly don't think we have.
Looking at the hype cycle, I am beginning to think that what you eat doesn't really matter, with a few caveats.
And it makes sense. We are omnivores, the entire point of being omnivores is to be able to fuel our body with whatever food is available, and it probably played an important role in the development of the human species. It means our body is very tolerant regarding what we eat, and while some types of food may be healthier than others, the effect will be small compared to other factors like generics, lifestyle, exposure to harm, etc...
What I think is important though is that we should have a diet as varied as possible. It is not necessary, but the less varied your diet is (it includes veganism), the more you need to pay attention. With a varied diet, you are very unlikely to miss something, and if you eat too much of the same thing, you may exceed the ability for your body to deal with a particular substance, making it toxic.
Another problem is the psychological aspect. Essentially, the abundance of food that we have now messes with our brain, causing addictive behavior. And I think this is the focus of most serious nutrition science today, and that's also what Ozempic is all about.
I've also found that particle sizes are also important: keeping things in their natural sizes and chewing them yourself does a couple of important things such as mixing them with enzymes, sending signalling about what's coming into the digestive tract, and making food the right size, instead of ultra fine, which provides a different mix of nutrients to the lower parts of the gi tract (and lowers absorbed calories from nuts).
I don't know if variety is actually the most important thing, but it certainly helps. It's probably more like:
1. Eat whole foods—prioritize nutrient-dense vegetables and some fruit in moderation.
2. If you can, vary your whole foods
3. Try not to eat too much sugar, especially with high triglycerides
4. Try not to eat too much salt, especially with high blood pressure
Everything else does seem quite overcomplicated. Nutrition has always been an area rife for capture by grifters, health gurus, and everything in-between.
This is a serious problem. How can we trust institutions that are suppose to provide evidence based advice to the general public? To me this is a crime so large that those involved should be held accountable for a percentage of all heart attacks. Furthermore it erodes trust in government, experts, and science. Right now it seems like the American public is actively feed extremely harmful food and lied to about the health consequences.
Is it possible to create a Reddit style voting system where votes are weighed more depending on a level of trust/expertise to review scientific papers. The voting could be on multiple factors, such as on the different types of validity, the overall impact, how transparent they are with methods and data, how well it fits with other literature, etc. The end result could be a paper titled “A survey of saturated fat’s impact on cardiovascular health” where experts very publicly discuss the papers merits and common people interested in their health can review and understand where the science is. Decentralized informational authority.
> This is a serious problem. How can we trust institutions that are suppose to provide evidence based advice to the general public?
The only serious problem here is that some people immediately trust a random article from someone who denies mainstream science simply because it’s a contrarian take.
I don’t understand the people who will question everything that comes from professionals and institutions, but within minutes of reading an article that is contrarian they think “Yep this all checks out and I have no further questions”. To see it happening in real time in this thread is wild.
Well, we read the article, which cites many studies. Maybe she is doing a super selective review of the field, but she does not merely quote one study, but several, all of which indicate that there is no correlation between saturated fat and cardiovascular problems.
IOW, we did not merely "read and trusted one random article" but assessed the presented evidence. You OTOH, merely provided ad-hominem attack on both the author and anyone who dared believe the presented evidence, which smacks of trying to shame people in not voicing their opinion.
Scientific knowledge evolves as new discoveries are made, immutable and unequivocal “truth” is the realm of religion, not science (which makes the former much more appealing to many than the latter).
Trust really should not erode if X acted in good faith based on the consensus knowledge at the time.
I agree that this reflects poorly on trust. But voting to give more authority to the federal government would make it even worse. Look at how poorly voting works.
It’s nonsense. SFA consumption is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Nina is misreading the evidence to come to poor quality conclusions. The most rigorous analysis of RCTs on the subject shows this very clearly:
"We found little or no effect of reducing saturated fat on all‐cause mortality (RR 0.96; 95% CI 0.90 to 1.03; 11 trials, 55,858 participants) or cardiovascular mortality (RR 0.95; 95% CI 0.80 to 1.12, 10 trials, 53,421 participants), both with GRADE moderate‐quality evidence.
There was little or no effect of reducing saturated fats on non‐fatal myocardial infarction (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.87 to 1.07) or CHD mortality (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.82 to 1.16, both low‐quality evidence), but effects on total (fatal or non‐fatal) myocardial infarction, stroke and CHD events (fatal or non‐fatal) were all unclear as the evidence was of very low quality. There was little or no effect on cancer mortality, cancer diagnoses, diabetes diagnosis, HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides or blood pressure, and small reductions in weight, serum total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and BMI."
Anyone else have alternative takes on cholesterol based on personal experience?
Some alternative theories I've come across:
- There's a theory that cholesterol is good for you. It's necessary for brain functioning. Low levels of "bad" cholesterol have been linked to depression.
- There's a theory that the high levels of cholesterol in blood clots found around ripped arteries may be due to the body trying to heal a rupture with cholesterol.
- There's a theory that seed oils and table sugar, which have only been mass consumed for the last 100 years or so, are what cause heart disease.
Personally, I have a very high level of both good and bad cholesterol. They shot up after I started eating a lot of non-veg food. And after they shot up, I stopped having depressive episodes.
> Some alternative theories I've come across:
> - There's a theory that cholesterol is good for you. It's necessary for brain functioning. Low levels of "bad" cholesterol have been linked to depression.
These aren’t alternative theories, they’re just reductive takes that try to ignore the big picture.
Reductive takes are really seductive for people who want to reduce everything into “good” or “bad” categories, but the body doesn’t work like that.
The part that confuses people is that the message has been simplified to “cholesterol bad” for so long that people are confused to discover that cholesterol is actually used by the body. Upon discovering these facts, reductive logic switches from “cholesterol bad” to “cholesterol good”, which is just as reductive.
The truth is that cholesterol is useful within the body, but that doesn’t mean that more of it is better. Despite all of the proponents of alternative theories trying to spin a different story, the bottom line is that cumulative lifetime LDL exposure is still correlated with heart disease.
That is the only thing you need to know about the debate if you want to reduce it to something simple. More LDL over time means more heart disease. A lot of people will try to “well actually…” various things around this, but it’s true.
Even the comments below are trying to tell you your own observation is impossible (that diet can’t affect cholesterol levels) when that’s clearly not true.
Cholesterol has become a hotbed of alternative medicine that doesn’t follow the science but sells well on social media. Don’t put too much confidence behind “alternative theories” when we have decades of evidence that excessively high cholesterol levels over a lifetime are correlated with heart disease.
> excessively high cholesterol levels over a lifetime are correlated with heart disease
You're talking about blood cholesterol levels. Yet we're talking about dietary cholesterol. Totally different things, it's now well known that they're unrelated. The cholesterol in our bodies is produced by the liver by a completely different process. The old science is pretty foolish for assuming dietary -> blood cholesterol, as if we didn't have a digestive system. If your point was "stick to the settled science and don't believe the alternatives" you couldn't have picked a worse example.
To the original topic, dietary saturated fat does appear to increase the risk of heart disease by increasing LDL cholesterol. In other words, blood cholesterol is a problem but it's driven, at least partly, by saturated fat intake. High dietary cholesterol food like eggs do not increase serum levels, unless you deep fry them in butter.
... in the Standard American Diet. Dr Paul Mason's video "The truth about high cholesterol"[1] at 9:40 he cites a study showing that increasing levels of "light buoyant undamaged LDL" do not correlate with increased heart disease risk over 15 years and 11,000 subjects. Then at 10:20 shows study results that increased levels of oxidised, damaged, small, dense LDL do correlate with increased heart disease. IIRC it's damaged by oxidation, glycation, plant phytosterol cholesterol-mimics (driven by increased seed oil consumption) and involved with disruption to lipid rafts which some medications cause, e.g. statins and anti-psychotics.
Part 2: The shady truth about statins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7r4j1u42V8& (studies showing they do lower cholesterol, and that doesn't lower the risk of heart disease).
There’s almost no correlation between cholesterol ingested as food and your own blood serum cholesterol. It’s almost as if we have a digestive system to break down nutrients into their constituents rather than release them unmodified into the bloodstream.
Yup, ingesting cholesterol doesn't lead to higher blood serum cholesterol. Although in this case the article was about ingesting saturated fat leading to higher blood serum cholesterol (in my personal experience this is true, and switching to a low saturated fat diet dropped my LDL cholesterol and triglycerides).
In general it matters what you replace the saturated fat with, though: you should replace it with unsaturated fat. Replacing it with carbs/simple sugars can apparently elevate LDL cholesterol and triglycerides: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2943062/
Cholesterol is a necessary part of every cell in our body. It allows flexibility of cell membranes despite variations in temperature, and also converts into steroid hormones.
LDL doesn't mean much, but rather the ratio of HDL:LDL. Low cholesterol is bad for the brain. Of course these are oversimplified statements.
There are known cases of older men with low testosterone level and high LDL, who after testosterone replacement therapy experienced a significant decrease in LDL. It's thought that the liver kept churning cholesterol in attempts to synthetize enough testosterone to no avail.
I believe that depression and cognitive dysfunction is a side-effect of too low cholesterol when people take statins, especially older folks, but excessive LDL also accumulates in arteries and lead to hypertension and/or diminished blood flow to organs, which itself leads to dementia, heart attacks, etc.
Unless research has changed since I las tread, about 75% of your cholesterol is manufactured in the human body and not ingested, so ingested cholesterol is of limited in fluence. I suspect the overall health of the body affects it more than eating saturated fats.
Cholesterol by itself isn't harmful. For most people with typical genetics, cholesterol only becomes a problem when arterial plaques form as a reaction to vascular damage. Limiting cholesterol is one fairly effective approach to preventing those plaques, but a better approach is to avoid the damage in the first place. In other words, it doesn't matter if a little extra cholesterol is floating around in your bloodstream as long as it doesn't stick to the walls.
I do have a fear that staying vegan will have other negative effects, unrelated to cholesterol - esp brain and bone density related. For me that means cutting out cheese, milk, and butter as much as possible. But having fish and lean meats 1-2 times per week.
I tried going vegan for ~10 years after reading the scientific research, then started getting stomach ulcers and constant diarrhea.
Tried with paleo (meat and veggies) as I thought the carbs were the culprit and I decreased the frequence of the accidents.
Finally I went carnivore and within a week I had zero symptoms. I was strict carnivore for 8 weeks (lost 8kgs) then I tried reintroducing other food but without great success.
These days I eat mainly butter, eggs and steak and I've been good for 2.5 years now (I was eating organs too at first but I don't really feel any difference if I don't eat them).
Eating the occasional sweet from a bakery makes me feel a bit bloated. Eating some fruit
For 1.5 years eating vegetables would cause the diarrhea to reappear, after 1.5 years I can eat vegetables occasionally without problems. It's like a "limit" got reset or something.
I was vegan for about ten years but it was socially crippling. These days I am vegan or vegetarian 4 or 5 days a week and have chicken or seafood the other there. A recent angiogram showed my coronary arteries are clear at 62 years old despite higher than acceptable LDL lower than normal triglycerides and an overall cholesterol score of 260
If you're concerned about bone density then why are you cutting out dairy products? Those are one of the best sources for the calcium we need (although it is possible to get enough from other foods or supplements).
> Pregnant women have extremely high cholesterol (ridiculously high).
Cholesterol levels rise during second and third trimesters, but it’s not true at all to say that all pregnant women have “ridiculously high” cholesterol. Around 24% of women who have normal range cholesterol will go over the normal range for a few months, but it’s not accurate at all to say they all have “ridiculously high” cholesterol
Cholesterol metabolism is related to hormones that change during pregnancy, so downstream fluctuations in cholesterol aren’t surprising. Do not mistake this for intentional evolutionary pressure to increase cholesterol.
> if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be.
This is an incredibly pseudoscientific way of thinking. Pregnancy puts many pressures on the body, not all of which are good.
Did you know that blood coagulability also rises during pregnancy, which is clearly linked to cardiac events. There is an increased risk of cardiac events during pregnancy.
Saying “X happens during pregnancy therefore X must be good” is an extremely unscientific and uninformed take. I’m not surprised it’s being leveraged by the cholesterol truthers, but it’s wrong. This is the level of reasoning that seems to appeal to people on TikTok and Twitter who consume feel-good science in 15 second clips, but it makes anyone who has read any actual research on the subject depressed at how susceptible people have become to bad science that is dangerous to their health.
> They shot up after I started eating a lot of non-veg food. And after they shot up, I stopped having depressive episodes.
do you know the parable of the drunk gentleman looking for his keys under a streetlamp at night? a policeman asked him where did he drop his keys, he pointed at a dark alleyway further away, so the policeman asked why he didn't look there instead, he replied "well there's no bloody light over there".
is it possible that you were deficient in some other nutrient, possibly even a trace one like some metal ion or maybe just some amino acid, and that's what caused the improvement in symptoms when you started eating flesh again? is it possible that you simply enjoyed the taste and then felt better about yourself? or any number of other changes in your life at the same time - taking more time cooking your meals, learning new recipes, trying new spices with it, etc?
There’s lot of evidence that excess sugar intake like modern humans do causes issues, especially diabetes, over a long time in a large percentage of people. There’s very little about seed oils though and that’s 90% internet hype
I do not know how much truth exists in the theory that an excess of saturated fats is harmful, but I have acted based on this theory and it was very beneficial for me.
A few years ago, I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis. This was an unpleasant surprise for me, so I have immediately made serious changes in the food that I eat.
At that time, I was eating very high quantities of dairy, which has a high proportion of saturated fat.
Because I could not see any other factor that could cause the atherosclerosis, I have eliminated dairy from my food and I have changed completely the composition of the fats contained in my food.
I eat only food that I cook myself, so I know exactly which is the composition of the fat contained in it. Nowadays, at least 90% of my daily intake of fat comes from a combination of oils that I use when cooking food (typically 60 mL of extra virgin olive oil + 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + 10 mL of cod liver oil + 1 drop of an oil containing D3 and K2 vitamins).
Instead of any other kinds of dairy, now I use only a cheese substitute that looks and tastes like melted cheese, but it is made from whey protein concentrate (which has almost no fat) mixed with some vegetable oil and a few other ingredients for better flavor.
After changing completely the fatty acid profile of my fat consumption, after a year the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there have been also other very noticeable signs of improved cardiovascular health. For instance, previously, I had cold feet and when sleeping I had to take care to keep them warm. Some months after changing the diet, they had become warm (presumably due to improved blood flow) and I have no longer needed any protection against lower temperatures.
So my diet change has very certainly improved a lot my health in a relatively short time of no more than a year, and that has persisted for the last three years. I cannot know if this is really caused by the change in the fatty acid profile, but I cannot see any other significant difference, except if the abundant dairy that I was eating before contained some other harmful substance or if the significant increase in the amount of eaten EV olive oil and cold-pressed sunflower oil has provided some benefits beyond the better fatty acid profile.
Logically, it is plausible that a reasonable amount of saturated fat, which is correlated with the amount of physical work, should not have any harmful effect.
As long as you burn enough calories daily to use all the fat intake for energy, it should not matter if that fat is saturated fat. However, when the fat is not completely used and some of it is deposited, then it is plausible that it is preferable if oleic acid (mono-unsaturated fatty acid) is the most abundant in food, because in normal conditions this is the most abundant fatty acid in the human reserve fat. When other fatty acids are much more abundant than oleic acid, they must be processed and converted before storage and the capacity for the conversion may be overwhelmed.
The negative connotations for "seed oils" are not applicable to all seed oils, but they refer only to the seed oils where linoleic acid is the most abundant acid.
Linoleic acid is an essential nutrient, but the need for it can be satisfied with 15 to 20 mL per day of a suitable seed oil, like sunflower oil. A greater daily intake than that can cause problems, because the excess linoleic acid must be converted into other fatty acids and also because some of its derivatives have physiological roles for which an excess quantity is not desirable.
Given these, it seems plausible that some fat composition is preferable to others. Like I said, I have acted on this assumption and it has worked very well for me, even if the real mechanism cannot be known, at least not yet.
Glad to hear you’ve improved your condition. The evidence suggests that crossing the 10% total energy as SFA threshold increases CVD incidence. There is no evidence (that I’ve seen) than “using up” this energy changes this risk factor.
Obviously the resulting obesity from consuming excess calories is a risk factor for CVD in itself, but the body of evidence would suggest that someone consuming >10% E from SFA, even if they’re in caloric equilibrium, will be at greater CVD risk than someone consuming less, all else held equal.
The main mechanism by which SFA is thought to increase CVD risk is by downregulation of LDL receptors, which occurs during the digestion/absorption of SFA, and is not a result of excess SFA hanging around in the body in some way. If you consume SFA, this pathway will be in play, regardless of how much is burned vs stored.
There’s no good evidence that seed oils/linoleic acid, refined or not, pose a risk for humans. There’s a lot of talk on the subject about on social media, but it’s almost entirely speculation based on animal studies.
I once bought the anti seed oil line, but on closer investigation of the evidence I changed my view and have replaced most of my SFA intake with MUFA/PUFA, mostly in the form of canola and olive oil.
> "it seems plausible that some fat composition is preferable to others."
However, it seems very implausible (or impossible) that humans evolved to need, or benefit from, industrially processed sunflower seeds and olive oil.
How has the total fat in your diet changed? I find it much more plausible that dramatically reducing cheese, cream, whole milk and full fat yoghurt has helped, than that replacing 20mL of cream with 20mL of sunflower oil has helped. It sounds like you have reduced fat overall - why then attribute the benefit to the vegetable oils / fat profile, specifically?
High cholesterol and heart attacks are common in my family. This year, after my dad had intensive open heart surgery, my doctor recommended trying a strict plant-based diet for 90 days with a blood test before and after. She had been studying medical journals on the topic primarily from Canada (she said it’s easier to find medical research not funded by corporations there).
Before the doing the plant-based diet, I had such high cholesterol that I would have needed to start taking statins before age 35. After the 90 day diet experiment, my cholesterol dropped by 130 mg/dL. I no longer need to be put on medication, and am within a healthy range.
I got a high LDL reading of about 200 (this is like top 3% percentile, if I remember correctly). I panicked and switched to an extremely low fat vegan diet, and I couldn't handle waiting so I paid to have my LDL tested again. My LDL had dropped to 130 after one week on that diet.
For me, at least, saturated fat is the most important nutrient I can monitor and avoid. Low saturated fat, high fiber is the diet for me.
I wasn't able to keep the vegan diet, but it was worth trying for a time because I learned some new recipes and new habits.
This past year I switched to a whole foods diet. I eat eggs, whole milk & cheese, veggies, fruit, white meat, saturated & unsaturated natural oils (nothing manufactured like margarine or anything hydrogenated), root veggies (potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips), beans/lentils (I'm not afraid of soy based things) grain based breads including whole wheat, whole wheat pasta. I tend to avoid red meat (pork and beef). I quit fast food and anything I suspected of a manufactured element. I was bordering on high cholesterol and pre diabetes. Since then I've dropped 35 lbs and everything is back in the normal range. I don't think you have to go vegan, just get away from all the over salted, over manufactured, sugar "enhanced" garbage. We're omnivores, I think we have the machinery to process normal foods. I admit this worked for me and may not work for everyone. The only "vice" I allow myself is a couple of diet cokes a day, but most days it's just coffee. I only will have a drink or two socially on the weekend and tend to stick to wine or clear spirits and lime/lemon.
For me it was both.. I had pretty bad BP and high enough cholesterol to that my doctor wanted me on a statin. Now my BP is normal, and my cholesterol is in the "low risk" range. My doctor said she'd never seen such an improvement before.
In my case it was not the suggestion of a doctor, but rather dating and now marrying a vegan. I converted to a plant based diet starting with eating plant based just with her, and then I became fully vegan for health reasons.
For what it’s worth, the linked article does not dispute that diet can affect blood cholesterol, but does argue that it doesn’t necessarily equal long term health.
> In other words, although diet could successfully lower blood cholesterol, this reduction did not appear to translate into long-term cardiovascular gains.
That said, as other commenters here have highlighted the author of the study has a spotty track record so, uh, big grain of salt.
> Hen tested (via ultra fast CT scan) the blood flow after the experiment -- there was no change.
> It may sound depressing
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of enforcing low cholesterol.
The goal would be to prevent further damage and restriction. By all accounts that test is a positive result.
Atherosclerosis is correlated with lifetime exposure to high cholesterol. Once you reach the point of having open heart surgery for severe problems, the goal is to slow further progression as much as possible.
Hoping to reverse a lifetime of accumulated exposure to high cholesterol with 7 years of slightly below average cholesterol just isn’t going to happen. Stopping further progression is great though!
Before, I ate low sugar / carb and high on cheese, meat, whole milk, yogurt, and veggies (close to keto). Now I eat a lot of rice, beans, while grains, and veggies. I’m trying to figure out how to get enough protein though, that’s the trade off.
Not OP, but I recently discovered that I have moderately high lipoprotein-a levels and decided to try to reduce my LDL as a result. I cut most eggs, all butter, all full-fat milk, almost all cheese, and switched from whole to skim yogurt. My LDL dropped about 20% between the beginning of August and the middle of October.
This advice has always come off as paternalistic to me, like the emphasis is on people just not being able to control themselves or something.
The first part is obvious.
The second part smuggles in a fundamentally incorrect take on the "eating too much"/obesity problem, namely that it has something to do with willpower: including "not too much" in the advice implies that we need to be told not to eat too much, but that a diet that naturally induces overeating is otherwise OK.
The third part is arbitrary and unfounded, and if you ignore it you can ignore the second part as well: get some good fatty meat on your plate and you can safely eat to satiety.
Is it, though? It seems like many struggle with the first part.
Does snacking on a vending machine Duchess Honey Bun or a sleeve of Oreos qualify as "eat food?" How about popping open a cup of instant ramen or microwaving some frozen taquitos? I'd call all of that eating junk, but I think that's the root of the issue.
I don't think of the second part being about self control and obesity, to me it's just a reinforcement of the idea that each person has different caloric requirements and you should respect your own needs. Of course it's vague so open to interpretation.
The third part feels as arbitrary and unfounded as any other dietary advice I read, so I'm inclined to take the simplest advice available.
To be fair, Pollan would specifically not consider a bag of potato chips food. It's not included here but he specifically is talking about "real" food and not ultra processed snacks, etc.
I think it's still an oversimplification - people with large amounts of muscle mass, low body fat, and high levels of daily physical activity just don't get a lot of the same metabolic diseases even if they eat huge amounts of animal protein, outside of really poor genetic luck (or complications related to steroid use, etc.) - but it's a pretty good starting point vs. the modern diet.
There is no such thing as scientific consensus. In a 2003 lecture at the California Institute of Technology Michael Crichton said, "Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period." https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/michael-crichton-explains-why...
I hate this Crichton quote so much. It gets thrown around all the time and no one thinks about how demonstrably false it is. Science obviously has plenty to do with consensus.
When an evolutionary scientist publishes a paper, do they have to reference or recapitulate the theory of evolution? No, because that position is scientific consensus. Ditto for the hypothesis that smoking increases cancer risk.
Consensus doesn’t mean “impossible to change”, it just means it is generally agreed upon. If some evidence about smoking and cancer comes out down the line, the consensus can change. It’s still the consensus, though.
You seem to hate lots of things and this subject makes you desperate to call yourself a specialist. There are 3 days you have been desperately trying to shutdown discussions in this thread. What is your problem?
Readit News
If you’d like to take a look at a critical review of her other work on this topic, I’d highly recommend this damning analysis of her “Big Fat Surprise” book: https://thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/the-b...
At least in the United States, the nutrition science of the last 100 years has overseen the most incredible deterioration of metabolic health in human history. There are some folks doing good work out there, as there always have been, but listening to mainstream nutrition science as if their word is law is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
The recommendations regarding fat hasn't changed in 30 years in most countries. FDA recommended limiting saturated fat already in 1980 (didn't bother looking further) and has recommended not exceeding an energy intake from fat over 30% since at least 1990. 30%e from fat is not a low fat diet.
The guidelines from 1980 explicitly mentions reducing saturated fat and sugar.
I think the problem is that we haven't been listening.
Reduced fat is an interesting one. If you actually look at what Keys was investigating all the way back in the mid 20th century, the hypothesis was always that saturated fat increased CVD risk. The translation of that into policy and marketing aimed at total fat cannot be placed entirely at the feet of mainstream nutrition science.
As to the claims that sugar is addictive, this is unsupported - sugar does not meet the DSM-V criteria for addictive substances based on current evidence (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-8077-9_...)
As for added sugar - again, you’re labelling policy decisions as nutrition science. The DGs that I’m aware of recommend as little added sugar as possible, but when you’re making policy you have to strike a balance between strict enough to make a difference, but not so restrictive that no one listens. That’s different from what mainstream nutrition science would claim (which is indeed that there are no benefits to added sugar and several risks).
The same point applies to your claim that nutrition science has a role in getting people to adhere to satiating diets. No, nutrition science is to help us understand what those diets might look like. It is not responsible for getting populations to adhere to them.
This is the fallacy that makes pseudoscience thrive right now: The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Wannabe influencers position themselves as the anti-establishment position. People who are frustrated with institutions blindly fall in line behind them.
The fallacy doesn’t stand up to even the simplest critical thinking, yet it triggers something subconsciously that leads far too many people to see a contrarian statement and assume it must be true.
Meanwhile, these people are grifting away, selling books and pitching Athletic Greens (or the latest sponsor of the day). This person is no exception.
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Personally, I follow the advice of Dr Micheal Gregor, one of his most recent books has over 13,000 citations! Their team has read over 20,000 nutritional papers!! And he'll tell you that whole grains and beans are an excellent staple of a healthy diet.
And with regards to Saturated Fat and even dietary cholesterol, he said, to make a really long story short, that they're really bad for you. There's way too many specifics to list but his 500+ page book (How not to age, and How not to Die) goes into great details and backs it up with a ton of research.
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[1] https://youtu.be/G0lTyhvOeJs?feature=shared
What unique feedback mechanism is this and how can i find out if i have this too ? circular reasoning "what makes them different is that they are shown to be different"
> they manage to escape heart attacks because their vessels are larger than average. Wow. I don’t know what to make of the Masai, except that they are indeed a unique people.
Maybe they are not "unique people" and there are other non-genetic reasons their blood vessels are larger.
I call BS on this so called review because author didn't bother to explain his points.
Get a blood lipids panel and see what your ApoB is like!
> Maybe they are not "unique people" and there are other non-genetic reasons their blood vessels are larger.
I don't think this effect has been observed in post mortem of other populations, so that would make them fairly unique, no?
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I did read the book and it seemed well cited.
If there are no more credible reviews do you care to substantiate your specific concerns with her work?
Just read the critique, ignore whatever “spamtaculous” things you’re seeing on the site. The content of the review is what we should care about. Happy to discuss that.
[1] https://maasai.com/conservation/maasai/
Much like in her book, Nina is grossly misrepresenting the evidence, and I’d say just flat-out lies or at the very least misleads the author. See my comment here for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41958014
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To me it’s no secret that the mainstream nutrition science is a joke. The latest Nordic nutrition guidelines I’ve heard of recommend the same amount of sugar and red meat per week — 350 grams.
If that’s not enough to tell you everything these organisations do is based on false premises, I have a bridge to sell you.
Please provide a source. The Danish health authorities absolutely do NOT recommend sugar consumption. Instead, they recommend eating 600g of fruits and vegetables, 100g of legumes, 30g of nuts, and 90g of whole grains DAILY, as well as 350g of fish and no more than 350g of meat WEEKLY. Source: https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/Media/638651862095615836/AOK-a...
Why?
Hi KempyKolibri. Was this intervention so important that you needed to signup for HackerNews for the first time to call her a joke ? I think this is quite against this forum guideline but (unsurprisingly) you are being upvoted.
Perhaps that's why there is a lot of sketchy results, hyperbole in communication, and a cycle of debunking (of the debunking) around.
My own metabolism and body is so different than when I started 40 years ago.
Current nutrition "science" is basically studying ensembles of weakly nonstationary processes and arriving at meaningless averages.
The whole method is completely stupid. It is why it feels like we have basically learned nothing in my lifetime in this field because I honestly don't think we have.
And it makes sense. We are omnivores, the entire point of being omnivores is to be able to fuel our body with whatever food is available, and it probably played an important role in the development of the human species. It means our body is very tolerant regarding what we eat, and while some types of food may be healthier than others, the effect will be small compared to other factors like generics, lifestyle, exposure to harm, etc...
What I think is important though is that we should have a diet as varied as possible. It is not necessary, but the less varied your diet is (it includes veganism), the more you need to pay attention. With a varied diet, you are very unlikely to miss something, and if you eat too much of the same thing, you may exceed the ability for your body to deal with a particular substance, making it toxic. Another problem is the psychological aspect. Essentially, the abundance of food that we have now messes with our brain, causing addictive behavior. And I think this is the focus of most serious nutrition science today, and that's also what Ozempic is all about.
I've also found that particle sizes are also important: keeping things in their natural sizes and chewing them yourself does a couple of important things such as mixing them with enzymes, sending signalling about what's coming into the digestive tract, and making food the right size, instead of ultra fine, which provides a different mix of nutrients to the lower parts of the gi tract (and lowers absorbed calories from nuts).
We’re good survivors for sure, but try eating only deep fried donuts for a year and let me know how omnivorous you feel.
1. Eat whole foods—prioritize nutrient-dense vegetables and some fruit in moderation.
2. If you can, vary your whole foods
3. Try not to eat too much sugar, especially with high triglycerides
4. Try not to eat too much salt, especially with high blood pressure
Everything else does seem quite overcomplicated. Nutrition has always been an area rife for capture by grifters, health gurus, and everything in-between.
Is it possible to create a Reddit style voting system where votes are weighed more depending on a level of trust/expertise to review scientific papers. The voting could be on multiple factors, such as on the different types of validity, the overall impact, how transparent they are with methods and data, how well it fits with other literature, etc. The end result could be a paper titled “A survey of saturated fat’s impact on cardiovascular health” where experts very publicly discuss the papers merits and common people interested in their health can review and understand where the science is. Decentralized informational authority.
The only serious problem here is that some people immediately trust a random article from someone who denies mainstream science simply because it’s a contrarian take.
I don’t understand the people who will question everything that comes from professionals and institutions, but within minutes of reading an article that is contrarian they think “Yep this all checks out and I have no further questions”. To see it happening in real time in this thread is wild.
IOW, we did not merely "read and trusted one random article" but assessed the presented evidence. You OTOH, merely provided ad-hominem attack on both the author and anyone who dared believe the presented evidence, which smacks of trying to shame people in not voicing their opinion.
Its isn't that someone says "Yep this all checks out and I have no further questions"
It's that this person is at least sharing references and the last person said "shut up and do what I say"
Does trust in X erode when X is wrong? Yes.
Scientific knowledge evolves as new discoveries are made, immutable and unequivocal “truth” is the realm of religion, not science (which makes the former much more appealing to many than the latter).
Trust really should not erode if X acted in good faith based on the consensus knowledge at the time.
Just get rid of the agency altogether.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
There was little or no effect of reducing saturated fats on non‐fatal myocardial infarction (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.87 to 1.07) or CHD mortality (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.82 to 1.16, both low‐quality evidence), but effects on total (fatal or non‐fatal) myocardial infarction, stroke and CHD events (fatal or non‐fatal) were all unclear as the evidence was of very low quality. There was little or no effect on cancer mortality, cancer diagnoses, diabetes diagnosis, HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides or blood pressure, and small reductions in weight, serum total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and BMI."
This is your citation for saturated fat is evil?
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Some alternative theories I've come across:
- There's a theory that cholesterol is good for you. It's necessary for brain functioning. Low levels of "bad" cholesterol have been linked to depression.
- There's a theory that the high levels of cholesterol in blood clots found around ripped arteries may be due to the body trying to heal a rupture with cholesterol.
- There's a theory that seed oils and table sugar, which have only been mass consumed for the last 100 years or so, are what cause heart disease.
Personally, I have a very high level of both good and bad cholesterol. They shot up after I started eating a lot of non-veg food. And after they shot up, I stopped having depressive episodes.
These aren’t alternative theories, they’re just reductive takes that try to ignore the big picture.
Reductive takes are really seductive for people who want to reduce everything into “good” or “bad” categories, but the body doesn’t work like that.
The part that confuses people is that the message has been simplified to “cholesterol bad” for so long that people are confused to discover that cholesterol is actually used by the body. Upon discovering these facts, reductive logic switches from “cholesterol bad” to “cholesterol good”, which is just as reductive.
The truth is that cholesterol is useful within the body, but that doesn’t mean that more of it is better. Despite all of the proponents of alternative theories trying to spin a different story, the bottom line is that cumulative lifetime LDL exposure is still correlated with heart disease.
That is the only thing you need to know about the debate if you want to reduce it to something simple. More LDL over time means more heart disease. A lot of people will try to “well actually…” various things around this, but it’s true.
Even the comments below are trying to tell you your own observation is impossible (that diet can’t affect cholesterol levels) when that’s clearly not true.
Cholesterol has become a hotbed of alternative medicine that doesn’t follow the science but sells well on social media. Don’t put too much confidence behind “alternative theories” when we have decades of evidence that excessively high cholesterol levels over a lifetime are correlated with heart disease.
You're talking about blood cholesterol levels. Yet we're talking about dietary cholesterol. Totally different things, it's now well known that they're unrelated. The cholesterol in our bodies is produced by the liver by a completely different process. The old science is pretty foolish for assuming dietary -> blood cholesterol, as if we didn't have a digestive system. If your point was "stick to the settled science and don't believe the alternatives" you couldn't have picked a worse example.
To the original topic, dietary saturated fat does appear to increase the risk of heart disease by increasing LDL cholesterol. In other words, blood cholesterol is a problem but it's driven, at least partly, by saturated fat intake. High dietary cholesterol food like eggs do not increase serum levels, unless you deep fry them in butter.
... in the Standard American Diet. Dr Paul Mason's video "The truth about high cholesterol"[1] at 9:40 he cites a study showing that increasing levels of "light buoyant undamaged LDL" do not correlate with increased heart disease risk over 15 years and 11,000 subjects. Then at 10:20 shows study results that increased levels of oxidised, damaged, small, dense LDL do correlate with increased heart disease. IIRC it's damaged by oxidation, glycation, plant phytosterol cholesterol-mimics (driven by increased seed oil consumption) and involved with disruption to lipid rafts which some medications cause, e.g. statins and anti-psychotics.
That talk is 1 of 3, they are here:
[1] The Truth about high cholesterol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdgS3PuSuyg "can we tell if we have normal or damaged LDL? Yes"
Part 2: The shady truth about statins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7r4j1u42V8& (studies showing they do lower cholesterol, and that doesn't lower the risk of heart disease).
Part 3: "Hard science on the real cause of heart disease - why you should avoid seed oils" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xCr3mvFCHM
[2] A comment I've made before about his views on saturated fats generally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966148 linking to his talk "Saturated Fat is not dangerous" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUY_SDhxf4k
"Why your doctor thinks cholesterol is bad" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-nq60_oEIc
In general it matters what you replace the saturated fat with, though: you should replace it with unsaturated fat. Replacing it with carbs/simple sugars can apparently elevate LDL cholesterol and triglycerides: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2943062/
Olive oil is good, candy is bad. (News at 11.)
LDL doesn't mean much, but rather the ratio of HDL:LDL. Low cholesterol is bad for the brain. Of course these are oversimplified statements.
There are known cases of older men with low testosterone level and high LDL, who after testosterone replacement therapy experienced a significant decrease in LDL. It's thought that the liver kept churning cholesterol in attempts to synthetize enough testosterone to no avail.
I believe that depression and cognitive dysfunction is a side-effect of too low cholesterol when people take statins, especially older folks, but excessive LDL also accumulates in arteries and lead to hypertension and/or diminished blood flow to organs, which itself leads to dementia, heart attacks, etc.
Tried with paleo (meat and veggies) as I thought the carbs were the culprit and I decreased the frequence of the accidents.
Finally I went carnivore and within a week I had zero symptoms. I was strict carnivore for 8 weeks (lost 8kgs) then I tried reintroducing other food but without great success.
These days I eat mainly butter, eggs and steak and I've been good for 2.5 years now (I was eating organs too at first but I don't really feel any difference if I don't eat them). Eating the occasional sweet from a bakery makes me feel a bit bloated. Eating some fruit For 1.5 years eating vegetables would cause the diarrhea to reappear, after 1.5 years I can eat vegetables occasionally without problems. It's like a "limit" got reset or something.
https://peterattiamd.com/belindabeck/
Pregnant women have extremely high cholesterol (ridiculously high).
- There's a theory that if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be.
Cholesterol levels rise during second and third trimesters, but it’s not true at all to say that all pregnant women have “ridiculously high” cholesterol. Around 24% of women who have normal range cholesterol will go over the normal range for a few months, but it’s not accurate at all to say they all have “ridiculously high” cholesterol
Here is a good overview: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989641/
Cholesterol metabolism is related to hormones that change during pregnancy, so downstream fluctuations in cholesterol aren’t surprising. Do not mistake this for intentional evolutionary pressure to increase cholesterol.
> if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be.
This is an incredibly pseudoscientific way of thinking. Pregnancy puts many pressures on the body, not all of which are good.
Did you know that blood coagulability also rises during pregnancy, which is clearly linked to cardiac events. There is an increased risk of cardiac events during pregnancy.
Saying “X happens during pregnancy therefore X must be good” is an extremely unscientific and uninformed take. I’m not surprised it’s being leveraged by the cholesterol truthers, but it’s wrong. This is the level of reasoning that seems to appeal to people on TikTok and Twitter who consume feel-good science in 15 second clips, but it makes anyone who has read any actual research on the subject depressed at how susceptible people have become to bad science that is dangerous to their health.
do you know the parable of the drunk gentleman looking for his keys under a streetlamp at night? a policeman asked him where did he drop his keys, he pointed at a dark alleyway further away, so the policeman asked why he didn't look there instead, he replied "well there's no bloody light over there".
is it possible that you were deficient in some other nutrient, possibly even a trace one like some metal ion or maybe just some amino acid, and that's what caused the improvement in symptoms when you started eating flesh again? is it possible that you simply enjoyed the taste and then felt better about yourself? or any number of other changes in your life at the same time - taking more time cooking your meals, learning new recipes, trying new spices with it, etc?
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A few years ago, I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis. This was an unpleasant surprise for me, so I have immediately made serious changes in the food that I eat.
At that time, I was eating very high quantities of dairy, which has a high proportion of saturated fat.
Because I could not see any other factor that could cause the atherosclerosis, I have eliminated dairy from my food and I have changed completely the composition of the fats contained in my food.
I eat only food that I cook myself, so I know exactly which is the composition of the fat contained in it. Nowadays, at least 90% of my daily intake of fat comes from a combination of oils that I use when cooking food (typically 60 mL of extra virgin olive oil + 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + 10 mL of cod liver oil + 1 drop of an oil containing D3 and K2 vitamins).
Instead of any other kinds of dairy, now I use only a cheese substitute that looks and tastes like melted cheese, but it is made from whey protein concentrate (which has almost no fat) mixed with some vegetable oil and a few other ingredients for better flavor.
After changing completely the fatty acid profile of my fat consumption, after a year the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there have been also other very noticeable signs of improved cardiovascular health. For instance, previously, I had cold feet and when sleeping I had to take care to keep them warm. Some months after changing the diet, they had become warm (presumably due to improved blood flow) and I have no longer needed any protection against lower temperatures.
So my diet change has very certainly improved a lot my health in a relatively short time of no more than a year, and that has persisted for the last three years. I cannot know if this is really caused by the change in the fatty acid profile, but I cannot see any other significant difference, except if the abundant dairy that I was eating before contained some other harmful substance or if the significant increase in the amount of eaten EV olive oil and cold-pressed sunflower oil has provided some benefits beyond the better fatty acid profile.
Logically, it is plausible that a reasonable amount of saturated fat, which is correlated with the amount of physical work, should not have any harmful effect.
As long as you burn enough calories daily to use all the fat intake for energy, it should not matter if that fat is saturated fat. However, when the fat is not completely used and some of it is deposited, then it is plausible that it is preferable if oleic acid (mono-unsaturated fatty acid) is the most abundant in food, because in normal conditions this is the most abundant fatty acid in the human reserve fat. When other fatty acids are much more abundant than oleic acid, they must be processed and converted before storage and the capacity for the conversion may be overwhelmed.
The negative connotations for "seed oils" are not applicable to all seed oils, but they refer only to the seed oils where linoleic acid is the most abundant acid.
Linoleic acid is an essential nutrient, but the need for it can be satisfied with 15 to 20 mL per day of a suitable seed oil, like sunflower oil. A greater daily intake than that can cause problems, because the excess linoleic acid must be converted into other fatty acids and also because some of its derivatives have physiological roles for which an excess quantity is not desirable.
Given these, it seems plausible that some fat composition is preferable to others. Like I said, I have acted on this assumption and it has worked very well for me, even if the real mechanism cannot be known, at least not yet.
Obviously the resulting obesity from consuming excess calories is a risk factor for CVD in itself, but the body of evidence would suggest that someone consuming >10% E from SFA, even if they’re in caloric equilibrium, will be at greater CVD risk than someone consuming less, all else held equal.
The main mechanism by which SFA is thought to increase CVD risk is by downregulation of LDL receptors, which occurs during the digestion/absorption of SFA, and is not a result of excess SFA hanging around in the body in some way. If you consume SFA, this pathway will be in play, regardless of how much is burned vs stored.
There’s no good evidence that seed oils/linoleic acid, refined or not, pose a risk for humans. There’s a lot of talk on the subject about on social media, but it’s almost entirely speculation based on animal studies.
I once bought the anti seed oil line, but on closer investigation of the evidence I changed my view and have replaced most of my SFA intake with MUFA/PUFA, mostly in the form of canola and olive oil.
However, it seems very implausible (or impossible) that humans evolved to need, or benefit from, industrially processed sunflower seeds and olive oil.
How has the total fat in your diet changed? I find it much more plausible that dramatically reducing cheese, cream, whole milk and full fat yoghurt has helped, than that replacing 20mL of cream with 20mL of sunflower oil has helped. It sounds like you have reduced fat overall - why then attribute the benefit to the vegetable oils / fat profile, specifically?
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Before the doing the plant-based diet, I had such high cholesterol that I would have needed to start taking statins before age 35. After the 90 day diet experiment, my cholesterol dropped by 130 mg/dL. I no longer need to be put on medication, and am within a healthy range.
For me, at least, saturated fat is the most important nutrient I can monitor and avoid. Low saturated fat, high fiber is the diet for me.
I wasn't able to keep the vegan diet, but it was worth trying for a time because I learned some new recipes and new habits.
In my case it was not the suggestion of a doctor, but rather dating and now marrying a vegan. I converted to a plant based diet starting with eating plant based just with her, and then I became fully vegan for health reasons.
> In other words, although diet could successfully lower blood cholesterol, this reduction did not appear to translate into long-term cardiovascular gains.
That said, as other commenters here have highlighted the author of the study has a spotty track record so, uh, big grain of salt.
Hen tested (via ultra fast CT scan) the blood flow after the experiment -- there was no change.
It may sound depressing, but it's actually very good for what is normally a progressive disease.
The experimenter is currently now doing another 7 year experiment, eating a somewhat healthier than normal diet + statins.
After getting off the ornish diet, there was hardly any change in total cholesterol.
*The diet was ornish-like because it was hard to get anything to eat when going out. The experimentar ate salmon if there was nothing better.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of enforcing low cholesterol.
The goal would be to prevent further damage and restriction. By all accounts that test is a positive result.
Atherosclerosis is correlated with lifetime exposure to high cholesterol. Once you reach the point of having open heart surgery for severe problems, the goal is to slow further progression as much as possible.
Hoping to reverse a lifetime of accumulated exposure to high cholesterol with 7 years of slightly below average cholesterol just isn’t going to happen. Stopping further progression is great though!
Truth is, it's complicated and neither your observation, nor mine, is enough to conclude anything.
The first part is obvious.
The second part smuggles in a fundamentally incorrect take on the "eating too much"/obesity problem, namely that it has something to do with willpower: including "not too much" in the advice implies that we need to be told not to eat too much, but that a diet that naturally induces overeating is otherwise OK.
The third part is arbitrary and unfounded, and if you ignore it you can ignore the second part as well: get some good fatty meat on your plate and you can safely eat to satiety.
Is it, though? It seems like many struggle with the first part.
Does snacking on a vending machine Duchess Honey Bun or a sleeve of Oreos qualify as "eat food?" How about popping open a cup of instant ramen or microwaving some frozen taquitos? I'd call all of that eating junk, but I think that's the root of the issue.
The third part feels as arbitrary and unfounded as any other dietary advice I read, so I'm inclined to take the simplest advice available.
I think it's still an oversimplification - people with large amounts of muscle mass, low body fat, and high levels of daily physical activity just don't get a lot of the same metabolic diseases even if they eat huge amounts of animal protein, outside of really poor genetic luck (or complications related to steroid use, etc.) - but it's a pretty good starting point vs. the modern diet.
When an evolutionary scientist publishes a paper, do they have to reference or recapitulate the theory of evolution? No, because that position is scientific consensus. Ditto for the hypothesis that smoking increases cancer risk.
Consensus doesn’t mean “impossible to change”, it just means it is generally agreed upon. If some evidence about smoking and cancer comes out down the line, the consensus can change. It’s still the consensus, though.
You seem to hate lots of things and this subject makes you desperate to call yourself a specialist. There are 3 days you have been desperately trying to shutdown discussions in this thread. What is your problem?