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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This is all true. And of course let us remember cholesterol is essential. Many hormones are made from it (cortisol, vitaminD, testosterone, estrogen). Being essential (not intending the meaning of "essential vitamin" which means the body cannot synthsize - as a vitamin it would be non-essential) - but being essential for physiology rather than diet, the body can synthesize cholesterol. So there is this axis of people who have low cholesterol super healthy diets.. and their body just makes lots of cholesterol anyway, so now they have high cholesterol and are taking statin drugs for it, because biology and population variation.
The other thing cholesterol is used to make, also quite nice to have, is bile. Used for fat digestion and such. A lot of bile. From a lot of cholesterol. Seems like a waste though, to excrete all that finely synthesized bodily chemical. BUt aha, the body realizes this and so resorbs it. THus there is a cycle and recycle of cholesterol and bile. Aha! What if we can trick the body to not resorb it and just release it. Such a drug has been developed. Well, hard to call it a drug. There is no fanciness, no elegant molecular binding to an esoteric receptor, no, nothing of the sort. It's called metamucil, and as the name tells us, it mostly works by being a big chonky mucinous blob of very impressively thick goop. The "magic" of how it works is literally the bile gets trapped in the thick goop and excreted. And thus we've bled off some bile from the cholesterol recycling loop, and thus, cholesterol. And that's why this weird blobby old person fiber supplement is cholesterol magic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
The definition I've heard of his for "food" in this sentence was "things your grandparents would recognise", although by this point it might be "your great-grandparents".
Yes, when we change the URL I almost always post the original link in the thread - I did that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957788 but of course these things can get lost in the shuffle
The book Outlive has a great discussion about CVD and diet. There is a link, and food types matter, but reducing foods to their saturated fat content is of course ridiculous as we now know.
I'm not sure how we can prevent organizations from being 'bribed' like this, but something has to be done. Misinformation like this has no doubt contributed to the obesity epidemic
The view of SFA consumption as a risk factor for CVD is not the result of bribes, it’s the result of the body of research on the subject pointing in that direction.
It’s rich of Nina to accuse Keys of cherry picking while claiming that there’s no RCT data supporting the diet-heart hypothesis because of the dodgy Hamley meta analysis, while ignoring Hooper 2020, which was far more rigorous and showed a 21% reduction in CVD events when PUFA was substituted for SFA: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
> not sure how we can prevent organizations from being 'bribed' like this
Statute that makes it fraud for a doctor (or anyone with medical certification) to make unsubstantiated health claims or strong claims based on weak science.
Although the author of the article appears to be controversial, I am concerned that none of the responses citing her controversial nature are actually rebutting anything in the paper.
I believe most of what was written here appears to be factual. What am I missing?
(Someone attacking the currently held beliefs taught by science is by nature controversial. More important question is whether they are pointing out flaws in those beliefs. )
FWIW I think contrarian scientific viewpoints are important if they're rigorous, and Teicholz makes a reasonable case for the viewpoint that saturated fat reductions are unrelated to mortality.
However, I don't think Teicholz herself is really being entirely "factual", bringing purported conflicts of interest into her discourse when it goes on on both sides. People have pointed out that her organization has its own history with this problem: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/257353-co....
That isn't addressing your question but I guess I disagree that Teicholz is just dispassionately presenting a rigorous argument, even if I find it compelling myself. Some of what she writes is sort of misleading (as that linked piece points out) even if I think her most cogent arguments are reasonable.
A lot of her arguments hinge on how you see things like the Cochrane meta-analysis. Her sensitivity analysis with colleagues is compelling in dismissing the CVE result in that meta-analysis, but at the same time you can whittle away any effect if there's not a big enough N (in a sort of inverse form of p-hacking), so I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced either.
Also as that piece points out, Teicholz seems dismissive of anything that's not mortality as an outcome, which I'm not sure I agree with.
I'm sympathetic to Teicholz's arguments, I guess I just feel like she doesn't make them any more convincingly to me than those she criticizes.
At this point for me personally my reading of the literature is that a lot of things are related to individual physiology, and I'm skeptical of a lot of blanket recommendations regarding nutrition. Reducing saturated fats has been good for me personally so I stick with that.
As for the claims about RCTs, she straight-up lies, quote:
“including by the prestigious Cochrane group, most recently in 2020. Altogether, >20 review papers, including umbrella reviews, have been published, with the vast majority concluding that the data from randomized, controlled trials do not provide consistent or adequate evidence for continued recommendations limiting the intake of saturated fat”
So what did the 2020 Cochrane paper actually say? Let’s look:
“ There was a 17% reduction in cardiovascular events in people who had reduced SFA compared with those on higher SFA”
“When we subgrouped according to replacement for SFA, the PUFA replacement group suggested a 21% reduction in cardiovascular events”
So she invokes the respectability of Cochrane yet claims their findings are incorrect, and tries to pass it off as a Cochrane reviewing showing that saturated fat is unrelated to heart disease? This alone should tell you everything you need to know about Teicholz. She relies on her audience not knowing the papers she references, because she misrepresents them to fit her agenda. She’s completely dishonest.
You picked out the one result in five or six from the summary of result that supports the reducing saturated fats and ignored the rest that said it disnt matter (and of those result all cause and cardiovascular mortality were in there in the saturated fat doesnt affect category). There are straight up lies here but they are in your response.
A friend stopped eating plants a year ago. Has since lost 150 lbs. Still has weight to lose, but this is the only thing that ever worked for her.
A family member stopped eating plants 9 months ago based on the friend's experience. Several medical issues that doctors were unable to help with for several years are gone. They were never in an overweight category and always ate healthy according to the guidelines, but they no longer need blood pressure meds, no longer have fibromyalgia, and the list goes on and on. This family member has their life back.
Another friend, 77 years old, just took a hike with us. 5 miles, 800 feet of elevation gain and loss. She hadn't been able to do anything like that in over 10 years, but 9 months plant free and she's able to do that again. She hasn't been able to play guitar for years because of arthritis in her hands. That has abated so much she now is playing guitar.
I got off plants 6 months ago, and my health has improved. I'm calmer and more focused.
This article is about fats, so what is the relevance of your comment?
Anyway, did any of these people try reintroducing plants in their diet? If not, at most we can say that a change in diet caused these improvements. We cannot say that plants are somehow a contributor to disease.
In fact, I've heard the same anecdotes as yours, except the diet change was the exact opposit: People who stopped eating meat and saw incredible changes to their health. These anecdotes and yours have one thing in common: Change.
We have good evidence that the gut microbiome can change its composition very quickly, in the manner of days, based on food intake. It's possible that some part of the microbiota were reduced or boosted as a result of the radical shift in the diet, and that you'd see a similar effect if you went meat -> plants.
If you're a science-minded person, you could try introducing specific things you eliminated, one by one. That is the principle behind an elimination diet, after all. For example, add broccoli for a week and see what happens. If you get worse, maybe it is the plants.
To be clear, it's quite possible for a temporary elimination diet to aleviate unexplained symptoms, for instance from an unknown food allergy or intolerance. But then you need to slowly reintroduce foods to find which specific food causes the problem, otherwise your diet is bound to be nutritionally deficient. Eliminating all plants from your diet permanently is insane.
I get that alot. If you only eat plants, people think its a bit quirky maybe, but fully accepted. But stop eating them and get great results, people can't handle it.
The reasons one diet is typically accepted and the other isn't is because the two diets are materially different. It's possible to have a nutritionally complete diet of only plants where the vast majority of the nutrients are naturally occurring in the food. The same is not true of a diet without plants; it's not possible to have a nutritionally complete diet without plants without a significant portion of nutrients coming only from supplementation.
It's true. I ran into a friend of my wife's yesterday who is a nurse. The topic of food came up and I mentioned I haven't eaten any plants in over two years. She snidely remarked "How's that constipation going for you?" She's 150 lbs overweight and looks 15 years older than her age. Meanwhile, I lost 20 lbs and cleared up a bunch of medical problems. (Including constipation.) People love to sit on their high horses and make snide remarks while evidence is staring them right in the face. It's wild.
I find I can eat plants along with my beef, lamb and butter as long as those plants are very low in "carbs": fennel, daikon radish, cauliflower, cabbage.
Although plants make up only a small fraction of my caloric intake, because they are much less dense in calories, they make up a large fraction of the mass (and volume) of the food I eat.
Those veggies are mostly fiber. Fiber is technically carbohydrate (hence my putting "carbs" in quotes earlier), but unlike most of the carbs in the typical person's diet, the fiber in the plants I eat doesn't get converted by my gut or my body into fructose or glucose, so fiber is OK for me to eat.
Most of the plant foods people eat that aren't loaded with the kind of carbs that get converted into fructose or glucose are loaded with oxalate, which I have tentatively concluded is a problem for me. Cabbage, cauliflower and radishes are extremely low in oxalate, for plants. Fennel is not particularly high, but also not particularly low in oxalate, so on days I eat fennel I take measures to encourage prompt elimination of the oxalate (i.e., I eat fennel only during the first meal of the day and I make sure to get plenty of calcium every meal that day).
It’s not a healthy long-term diet. But as a treatment diet, going all in on fat and protein absolutely works for weight loss. You’re probably in ketosis, for example.
The idea that saturated fats cause heart disease, called the diet-heart hypothesis, was introduced in the 1950s, based on weak, associational evidence. Subsequent clinical trials attempting to substantiate this hypothesis could never establish a causal link. However, these clinical-trial data were largely ignored for decades, until journalists brought them to light about a decade ago. Subsequent reexaminations of this evidence by nutrition experts have now been published in >20 review papers, which have largely concluded that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. The current challenge is for this new consensus on saturated fats to be recognized by policy makers, who, in the United States, have shown marked resistance to the introduction of the new evidence. In the case of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines, experts have been found even to deny their own evidence. The global re-evaluation of saturated fats that has occurred over the past decade implies that caps on these fats are not warranted and should no longer be part of national dietary guidelines. Conflicts of interest and longstanding biases stand in the way of updating dietary policy to reflect the current evidence.
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.
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...
Thank you for providing this very helpful and needed context. I was indeed getting very excited.
Are there any similar problems with this essay? I am pretty sure I've heard much of this before ...
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
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.
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 just remembered something:
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 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.
What are some no-brainer strategies to avoid the damage please? Thanks.
Don't smoke, keep your blood pressure under control, and don't become insulin resistant.
This is all true. And of course let us remember cholesterol is essential. Many hormones are made from it (cortisol, vitaminD, testosterone, estrogen). Being essential (not intending the meaning of "essential vitamin" which means the body cannot synthsize - as a vitamin it would be non-essential) - but being essential for physiology rather than diet, the body can synthesize cholesterol. So there is this axis of people who have low cholesterol super healthy diets.. and their body just makes lots of cholesterol anyway, so now they have high cholesterol and are taking statin drugs for it, because biology and population variation.
The other thing cholesterol is used to make, also quite nice to have, is bile. Used for fat digestion and such. A lot of bile. From a lot of cholesterol. Seems like a waste though, to excrete all that finely synthesized bodily chemical. BUt aha, the body realizes this and so resorbs it. THus there is a cycle and recycle of cholesterol and bile. Aha! What if we can trick the body to not resorb it and just release it. Such a drug has been developed. Well, hard to call it a drug. There is no fanciness, no elegant molecular binding to an esoteric receptor, no, nothing of the sort. It's called metamucil, and as the name tells us, it mostly works by being a big chonky mucinous blob of very impressively thick goop. The "magic" of how it works is literally the bile gets trapped in the thick goop and excreted. And thus we've bled off some bile from the cholesterol recycling loop, and thus, cholesterol. And that's why this weird blobby old person fiber supplement is cholesterol magic.
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.
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.
I had a similar experience, except with blood pressure. After switching to a plant based diet, it’s the lowest it’s been in my adult life.
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.
what did you eliminate, i.e. what were you eating before? eggs, milk, cheese/yogurt (fermented diary), meat, processed meat?
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.
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.
A family member went on the ornish-like diet + atorvastatin for 7 years* after open heart surgery for block in the left main.
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 didnt realize that the diet im doing right now has a name, ornish! Just to clarify, so this diet actually works in preventing further damage?
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.
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.
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:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
The only trendy food advice I'll ever follow is Michael Pollan's: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
I remind this motto as bell but he should have put emphasis on "food you made"
His definition of food is narrower than just edible things. I recall the book discussed processed vs more "raw" foods.
The definition I've heard of his for "food" in this sentence was "things your grandparents would recognise", although by this point it might be "your great-grandparents".
Nina Teicholz is a bit of a controversial figure in the nutrition world so I'd advise people to take this with a grain of salt...
Related:
Saturated fat: the making and unmaking of a scientific consensus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942840 - Dec 2022 (6 comments)
*Original article submitted to HN: https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/american-heart-association...
Yes, when we change the URL I almost always post the original link in the thread - I did that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957788 but of course these things can get lost in the shuffle
The book Outlive has a great discussion about CVD and diet. There is a link, and food types matter, but reducing foods to their saturated fat content is of course ridiculous as we now know.
how is it ridiculous? so far, reducing saturated fat intake has a direct correlation with lowering LDL that is a marker for cardio risk no?
I'm not sure how we can prevent organizations from being 'bribed' like this, but something has to be done. Misinformation like this has no doubt contributed to the obesity epidemic
The view of SFA consumption as a risk factor for CVD is not the result of bribes, it’s the result of the body of research on the subject pointing in that direction.
It’s rich of Nina to accuse Keys of cherry picking while claiming that there’s no RCT data supporting the diet-heart hypothesis because of the dodgy Hamley meta analysis, while ignoring Hooper 2020, which was far more rigorous and showed a 21% reduction in CVD events when PUFA was substituted for SFA: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
> not sure how we can prevent organizations from being 'bribed' like this
Statute that makes it fraud for a doctor (or anyone with medical certification) to make unsubstantiated health claims or strong claims based on weak science.
Although the author of the article appears to be controversial, I am concerned that none of the responses citing her controversial nature are actually rebutting anything in the paper.
I believe most of what was written here appears to be factual. What am I missing?
(Someone attacking the currently held beliefs taught by science is by nature controversial. More important question is whether they are pointing out flaws in those beliefs. )
FWIW I think contrarian scientific viewpoints are important if they're rigorous, and Teicholz makes a reasonable case for the viewpoint that saturated fat reductions are unrelated to mortality.
However, I don't think Teicholz herself is really being entirely "factual", bringing purported conflicts of interest into her discourse when it goes on on both sides. People have pointed out that her organization has its own history with this problem: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/257353-co....
That isn't addressing your question but I guess I disagree that Teicholz is just dispassionately presenting a rigorous argument, even if I find it compelling myself. Some of what she writes is sort of misleading (as that linked piece points out) even if I think her most cogent arguments are reasonable.
A lot of her arguments hinge on how you see things like the Cochrane meta-analysis. Her sensitivity analysis with colleagues is compelling in dismissing the CVE result in that meta-analysis, but at the same time you can whittle away any effect if there's not a big enough N (in a sort of inverse form of p-hacking), so I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced either.
Also as that piece points out, Teicholz seems dismissive of anything that's not mortality as an outcome, which I'm not sure I agree with.
I'm sympathetic to Teicholz's arguments, I guess I just feel like she doesn't make them any more convincingly to me than those she criticizes.
At this point for me personally my reading of the literature is that a lot of things are related to individual physiology, and I'm skeptical of a lot of blanket recommendations regarding nutrition. Reducing saturated fats has been good for me personally so I stick with that.
I’m happy to discuss the paper. All her takes on the Seven Countries Studies are just poor. France wasn’t excluded by design, for example. All this is covered by a white paper here: https://www.truehealthinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
As for the claims about RCTs, she straight-up lies, quote: “including by the prestigious Cochrane group, most recently in 2020. Altogether, >20 review papers, including umbrella reviews, have been published, with the vast majority concluding that the data from randomized, controlled trials do not provide consistent or adequate evidence for continued recommendations limiting the intake of saturated fat”
So what did the 2020 Cochrane paper actually say? Let’s look: “ There was a 17% reduction in cardiovascular events in people who had reduced SFA compared with those on higher SFA” “When we subgrouped according to replacement for SFA, the PUFA replacement group suggested a 21% reduction in cardiovascular events”
So she invokes the respectability of Cochrane yet claims their findings are incorrect, and tries to pass it off as a Cochrane reviewing showing that saturated fat is unrelated to heart disease? This alone should tell you everything you need to know about Teicholz. She relies on her audience not knowing the papers she references, because she misrepresents them to fit her agenda. She’s completely dishonest.
Ref to Cochrane: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
You picked out the one result in five or six from the summary of result that supports the reducing saturated fats and ignored the rest that said it disnt matter (and of those result all cause and cardiovascular mortality were in there in the saturated fat doesnt affect category). There are straight up lies here but they are in your response.
KempyKolibri account on HN was created 4 hours ago, same time as when this article arrived on HN.
It seems Kempy could be a business person whose business here is only to discuss this article.
[flagged]
Doctors who prescribe medication to reduce your cholesterol is like Geek Squad disabling your AV because you've got too many viruses
A friend stopped eating plants a year ago. Has since lost 150 lbs. Still has weight to lose, but this is the only thing that ever worked for her.
A family member stopped eating plants 9 months ago based on the friend's experience. Several medical issues that doctors were unable to help with for several years are gone. They were never in an overweight category and always ate healthy according to the guidelines, but they no longer need blood pressure meds, no longer have fibromyalgia, and the list goes on and on. This family member has their life back.
Another friend, 77 years old, just took a hike with us. 5 miles, 800 feet of elevation gain and loss. She hadn't been able to do anything like that in over 10 years, but 9 months plant free and she's able to do that again. She hasn't been able to play guitar for years because of arthritis in her hands. That has abated so much she now is playing guitar.
I got off plants 6 months ago, and my health has improved. I'm calmer and more focused.
This article is about fats, so what is the relevance of your comment?
Anyway, did any of these people try reintroducing plants in their diet? If not, at most we can say that a change in diet caused these improvements. We cannot say that plants are somehow a contributor to disease.
In fact, I've heard the same anecdotes as yours, except the diet change was the exact opposit: People who stopped eating meat and saw incredible changes to their health. These anecdotes and yours have one thing in common: Change.
We have good evidence that the gut microbiome can change its composition very quickly, in the manner of days, based on food intake. It's possible that some part of the microbiota were reduced or boosted as a result of the radical shift in the diet, and that you'd see a similar effect if you went meat -> plants.
If you're a science-minded person, you could try introducing specific things you eliminated, one by one. That is the principle behind an elimination diet, after all. For example, add broccoli for a week and see what happens. If you get worse, maybe it is the plants.
This is insane.
To be clear, it's quite possible for a temporary elimination diet to aleviate unexplained symptoms, for instance from an unknown food allergy or intolerance. But then you need to slowly reintroduce foods to find which specific food causes the problem, otherwise your diet is bound to be nutritionally deficient. Eliminating all plants from your diet permanently is insane.
I get that alot. If you only eat plants, people think its a bit quirky maybe, but fully accepted. But stop eating them and get great results, people can't handle it.
The reasons one diet is typically accepted and the other isn't is because the two diets are materially different. It's possible to have a nutritionally complete diet of only plants where the vast majority of the nutrients are naturally occurring in the food. The same is not true of a diet without plants; it's not possible to have a nutritionally complete diet without plants without a significant portion of nutrients coming only from supplementation.
> It's possible to have a nutritionally complete diet of only plants
Vegans need B12 supplementation.
It's true. I ran into a friend of my wife's yesterday who is a nurse. The topic of food came up and I mentioned I haven't eaten any plants in over two years. She snidely remarked "How's that constipation going for you?" She's 150 lbs overweight and looks 15 years older than her age. Meanwhile, I lost 20 lbs and cleared up a bunch of medical problems. (Including constipation.) People love to sit on their high horses and make snide remarks while evidence is staring them right in the face. It's wild.
I find I can eat plants along with my beef, lamb and butter as long as those plants are very low in "carbs": fennel, daikon radish, cauliflower, cabbage.
Although plants make up only a small fraction of my caloric intake, because they are much less dense in calories, they make up a large fraction of the mass (and volume) of the food I eat.
Those veggies are mostly fiber. Fiber is technically carbohydrate (hence my putting "carbs" in quotes earlier), but unlike most of the carbs in the typical person's diet, the fiber in the plants I eat doesn't get converted by my gut or my body into fructose or glucose, so fiber is OK for me to eat.
Most of the plant foods people eat that aren't loaded with the kind of carbs that get converted into fructose or glucose are loaded with oxalate, which I have tentatively concluded is a problem for me. Cabbage, cauliflower and radishes are extremely low in oxalate, for plants. Fennel is not particularly high, but also not particularly low in oxalate, so on days I eat fennel I take measures to encourage prompt elimination of the oxalate (i.e., I eat fennel only during the first meal of the day and I make sure to get plenty of calcium every meal that day).
It’s not a healthy long-term diet. But as a treatment diet, going all in on fat and protein absolutely works for weight loss. You’re probably in ketosis, for example.
We changed the URL from https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/american-heart-association..., which points to this.
(Submitted title was "AHA Was Paid By P&G To Say Heart Disease Caused By Saturated Fat, Not Seed Oils")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evie_Magazine
I think that story was actually better than this paper, which appears to have been authored by a controversial figure.
I'm open to changing it back but that would be just as controversial, no? because it's about the same work.
TL;DR from the fine article:
Summary
The idea that saturated fats cause heart disease, called the diet-heart hypothesis, was introduced in the 1950s, based on weak, associational evidence. Subsequent clinical trials attempting to substantiate this hypothesis could never establish a causal link. However, these clinical-trial data were largely ignored for decades, until journalists brought them to light about a decade ago. Subsequent reexaminations of this evidence by nutrition experts have now been published in >20 review papers, which have largely concluded that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. The current challenge is for this new consensus on saturated fats to be recognized by policy makers, who, in the United States, have shown marked resistance to the introduction of the new evidence. In the case of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines, experts have been found even to deny their own evidence. The global re-evaluation of saturated fats that has occurred over the past decade implies that caps on these fats are not warranted and should no longer be part of national dietary guidelines. Conflicts of interest and longstanding biases stand in the way of updating dietary policy to reflect the current evidence.