My surgeon friend told me medical studies are like the bible. You can find a paper that says something is bad for you and another that says it is good for you. So just believe the one that makes you happier.
US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
21–30 of 269 posts
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#22Let me know when the government wakes up and inverts the food pyramid, so that breads and grains and carbs are scarce, rather than fats.
Since 2011 they've been recommending MyPlate:
https://choosemyplate-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files...
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#23There is so much that 'everybody knows' about nutrition that is pure bullshit peddled by farmers, agribusiness and processed food companies. Just one example-- that fat causes heart disease. Pure nonsense pushed by the soda and sugar industry. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co... Just eat a balanced diet, don't overeat, and don't eat too much processed food and red meat, and you'll probably…
And the injustice here is that no nutritionists or agribusiness executives will go to prison for murdering tens of millions of people prematurely.
Meanwhile, well, you know, Aaron Swartz.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#24Wouldn't it be nice if there were more government warnings and less restrictions / regulations? Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster. The history of medical reversals…
> Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster.
I'd go one step further. Give the FDA competition. Have private companies (similar to UL for electronics) that can endorse and test drugs.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#25There is so much that 'everybody knows' about nutrition that is pure bullshit peddled by farmers, agribusiness and processed food companies. Just one example-- that fat causes heart disease. Pure nonsense pushed by the soda and sugar industry. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co... Just eat a balanced diet, don't overeat, and don't eat too much processed food and red meat, and you'll probably…
Fat from animal products greatly increases your cholesterol levels, and high cholesterol levels is the only risk factor for atherosclerosis besides smoking. It's not just red meat either, chicken and fish also increase the risk of chronic disease and all-cause mortality and there is plenty of mechanistic data from numerous studies to back this up.
Diet is only bullshit if you're really uninformed and honestly it's a shame that the government is now promoting diets which increase chronic disease risk for some of the biggest killers in the US, heart-disease, cancer, and diabetes.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#26Wouldn't it be nice if there were more government warnings and less restrictions / regulations? Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster. The history of medical reversals…
Drug approvals are currently much better than nutrition studies. Your suggestion of allowing not-known-to-work "medicine" to be sold would return us to the era of patent medicines, which killed a lot of people. You can look at the supplements market to see people dying from a similar policy right now.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#27Wouldn't it be nice if there were more government warnings and less restrictions / regulations? Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster. The history of medical reversals…
The science behind nutrition health is extremely complicated and expecting it to remain constant represent a total misunderstanding of how nutrition research is done and how results are determined.
> The history of medical reversals -- and in this case, nutrition reversal -- shows that the government isn't magic.
What it shows is that nutrition science is hardly 'solved' and you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher in the field suggest otherwise.
> A whole raft of restrictions could be converted to warnings and recommendations, freeing up industry to innovate and consumers to take a little more responsibility for themselves.
The problem with this is that the average consumer is both A) dumb, and B) doesn't know what they need. Alternative medicine skirts very cleanly around FDA regulation by not making any medical claims on it's product. They still market their product as a solution for various diseases and conditions, but they never make a formal claim. It's a $30,000,000,000 industry of people buying stuff that does nothing, or worse yet, can cause potential harm. To suggest their is no value in regulation of the drug markets is to suggest that people's health has no value. The defense of, 'well, people are responsible for their own decisions' doesn't hold any water when we know that the direct consequences of that mentality can be measured in literally tens of billions of dollars.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#28Wouldn't it be nice if there were more government warnings and less restrictions / regulations? Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster. The history of medical reversals…
> Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials.
The way you'd like the FDA to work is literally the way it already works. You're allowed to buy basically any drug you want unless it's scheduled by the DEA. Companies just aren't allowed to market them as being effective for a specific disease without passing clinical trials.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#29Wouldn't it be nice if there were more government warnings and less restrictions / regulations? Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster. The history of medical reversals…
> Imagine if the FDA, instead of blocking new drugs for 10 years and $1B, it simply withheld its endorsement until satisfied by the clinical trials. Consumers could then take the government's recommendations into consideration when making a decision and drugs could get to market much faster. I'd go one step further. Give the FDA competition. Have private companies (similar to UL for electronics) that can endorse and…
Private companies have profit incentives. If a horrible substance comes to market they can be paid off to endorse it.
You can argue that no rational company that cares about its reputation would do such a thing, but history has shown time and time again - yes corporations do waive all consideration for public safety in lieu for money.
The government is the perfect institution to endorse safety of substances/drugs/whatever for use by it's citizens. That doesn't mean they are perfect though, but I would trust them a thousand times more than a corporation.
It's extremely wreckless to apply free market economic theories to things like this. In the real world, consumers and businesses are irrational.
Re: US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)
#30Here is my paraphrased takeaway: Cholesterol you see in your blood results is still bad. Whole milk, butter, and fatty meats is still bad. Foods like eggs, shrimp, and lobster might be good. I don't think this changes any of my mental models. The foods that I always thought of as "probably not great" are still classified as such, according to this article.
Still really incomplete. Medium-chain-triglycerides, for example, are still listed as saturated fats but don't carry the same negative weight that long-chain fatty acids do.[1]
"Probably not great" food has vacillated greatly over the decades, eggs being the cliche example. Dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol are often not directly connected.[2] The relationship between (any) saturated fats and blood cholesterol is not clearcut.
[1] http://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(03)00070...