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New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

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Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#81

Post by ncmncm »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #12
hpoe wrote: post #3

This is why I have three things I never trust the experts in. - How to be healthy - How to educate - How to raise kids It seems like every decade we find out everything we did last decade was bad and wrong but now we've finally for sure got it figured out, and this time we know we are right because we have fancier gadgets and more citations in our name. From Frued to the Food Pyramid it seems that the experts always…

I learned recently that the Food Pyramid was created by the Department of Agriculture in the US, i.e. not by the Department of Health. So, not experts. (Not in the field they were claiming).

It's worse. It was created by the Dairy Council as a way to promote dairy products, and then distributed to schools by the DoA.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#82

Post by dang »

wtetzner wrote: post #21

The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided. It seems more likely that the supposedly "heart healthy" seed oils are causing heart disease. The Carnivore Code has some very good insights (at least in my opinion) [1] And this talk on how seed oils are destroying our health is also pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM [1] https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Re…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115815.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#83

Post by airstrike »

elhudy wrote: post #5

I am close with someone who has chronic high cholesterol, in addition to a 6-pack abs. She exercises 5x/week and eats .5kg of animal products/week at most, usually white meat. She just visited her heart Dr and was told that her cholesterol is too high and that she needs to cut out animal products entirely as a next step. I am thinking...is this really the modern answer to someone's high cholesterol if they consistent…

Does she eat a lot of sugar?

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#84

Post by jandrese »

simonhughes22 wrote: post #28
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandmother has been diagnosed with high cholesterol since I was a toddler. She's 104 years old and survived COVID this summer.

Similar - my grandfather is my only grand parent with high cholesterol, he's now 93 and has out lived all my other grand parents and his sister. It's clear to me that there's a lot here that we still don't understand.

For one it's a statistical risk factor, not a guaranteed death sentence. There will always be outliers.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#85

Post by mrkeen » 

    A: saturated fats

    B: LDL cholesterol

    C: heart disease
studies show saturated fats increase LDL cholesterol

    A => B
People who get heart disease are more likely to have high LDL cholesterol

    C => B
> Researchers have thus drawn a logical conclusion: a lot of saturated fat in the diet produces more cholesterol, which in turn increases the risk of heart disease.

    A => B /\ B => C
> But this has been surprisingly difficult to prove.

You don't say?

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#86

Post by UncleOxidant »

elhudy wrote: post #5

I am close with someone who has chronic high cholesterol, in addition to a 6-pack abs. She exercises 5x/week and eats .5kg of animal products/week at most, usually white meat. She just visited her heart Dr and was told that her cholesterol is too high and that she needs to cut out animal products entirely as a next step. I am thinking...is this really the modern answer to someone's high cholesterol if they consistent…

Did the doc do any kind of test to determine current levels of plaque in the arteries? There's a test that's done via ultrasound (IIRC) on the carotid artery that can give a pretty good idea of current plaque levels.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#87

Post by mark-r »

flowerlad wrote: post #53

The idea that it is inflammation, not cholesterol, that is causing heart disease, is not new. See here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-04-15/heart-dis... Also see collection of links at bottom of this article: https://medium.com/@petilon/cholesterol-and-statins-e7d9d8ee... Cholesterol reduction is big business. Pfizer’s Lipitor alone raked in $125 billion between 1996 to 2012. This amount of money can b…

I've always wondered if the reason a daily aspirin prevents heart attacks isn't because it prevents clotting, but because it's an anti-inflammatory.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#88

Post by viraptor »

elhudy wrote: post #5

I am close with someone who has chronic high cholesterol, in addition to a 6-pack abs. She exercises 5x/week and eats .5kg of animal products/week at most, usually white meat. She just visited her heart Dr and was told that her cholesterol is too high and that she needs to cut out animal products entirely as a next step. I am thinking...is this really the modern answer to someone's high cholesterol if they consistent…

Could be also something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_hypercholesterolemia where it's just due to genes and bad luck. You can do generic tests for it, but they're relatively expensive. Statins mostly help bring the numbers down.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#89

Post by megameter »

sradman wrote: post #75
beowulfey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more: PROBLEM #2: high serum cholesterol is correlated to cardiovascular disease, but eating high saturated fat-diets is not . ANSWER #2: It appears that studies that assess the effect of a particular diet depends a lot upon the health of the individual prior to the study start; thus, using a random population results in non-significant results. Note that I agree with you otherwise. I would suspect that…

My key takeaway is that the ratio of saturated:unsaturated fat in the diet does control the concentration of serum cholesterol but any ratio between 1:0 and 0:1 (provided you get enough essential fats) is perfectly normal and does not impact health negatively either way. The function of serum cholesterol is maintaining cell rigidity throughout the body, not just in arteries. I have never heard this explanation before…

Speaking anecdotally, I put a few logical ideas together from different articles and got an answer that seems to work for me some years ago:

1. Simple carbs like sugar are metabolic stressors

2. Saturated fats, as well as other agents like caffeine can act to accelerate the metabolisation of sugar

3. If you consume a stressor with an accelerator, you are more likely to do damage than if they are spread out or diluted e.g. with fiber, so don't do that

4. (Something something exercise)

This hypothesis, while lacking in rigor, explains why I can have two burgers and be fine, but be miserable if I have a burger, fries and a coffee.

Re: New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

#90

Post by rafaelero »

nradov wrote: post #62
rafaelero wrote: post #52

I can't help but think that there is active effort to halt our understanding of nutrition. I mean, if we still can't say at least that saturated fat is causally related to heart disease, then this whole field is in a very bad place. My hypothesis though, is that this finding has already been established but people keep coming back to this subject to try to adjust it to their lifestyle choices.

Your hypothesis is incorrect, or at least not justified by the data. The whole field of human nutrition actually is in a very bad place. Most of what we think we know comes from low quality observational studies which don't rate well on the evidence based medicine scale. By all means let's continue research. But people generally shouldn't rely upon most of it when making dietary choices. A better approach is to condu…

But you see, I don't agree that these conclusions are based on low quality data. These conclusions are not merely based on observational studies, as you pointed. This question is being asked for more than 70 years and a lot of different types of designs have been tried: putting people on strictly monitored diets and seeing what happens to their biomarkers, finding people with weird mutations that lower their LDL cholesterol, etc. By the way, the only type of data that disagrees with the expert's conclusion are, you guessed it, observational data. And that is simply because there are so much individual variation that these studies end up always underpowered. If you track the same individual and changes his/her diet, the conclusion is inescapable: saturated fat increases LDL cholesterol. And LDL cholesterol is causally linked to heart disease.

I don't mean to say that this narrative can't be pushed back, but these articles comes from the [wrong] premise that these findings are not solid. They are. It's the same as trying to advance the idea that trans fat is not dangerous to someone's health: you surely could try, but the prior should be low. That's is why I advanced the hypothesis that people are craving for these types of news that validate their lifestyles: they don't seem to be properly calculating their priors and are dismissing too quickly solid evidence.

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