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How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

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Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#141

Post by randallsquared »

analog wrote: post #136
BSousa wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the study, only 26.7% difference wasn't explained by age/sex/weight. Which means for almost 75% the values were somehow dependent on sex/age/weight. And the difference between the top 5% and bottom 5% of the outliers was around 30% (which means for a 2000kcal average BMR, the bottom needed only 1700 and top 2300). This, in my opinion, is not enough for people to tout slow/fast metabolism for weight gain/…

Even if you're eating just 300kcal over what you need every day you will become overweight eventually. Edit: for reference 300kcal is about what you'd burn off with a 4 kilometer run.

"Eventually"? That's putting on 30 pounds a year, assuming it's all about (caloriesIn - caloriesUsed) / 3600 = poundsOfFat.

Of course, anyone who has dieted long term knows that that's not the whole story. You might cut your calories in half and still plateau within a few months.

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#142

Post by tokenadult »

Is the link submitted here throwing 403 errors for other HN users? I notice that many comments here on HN could just as well be responding to the bare title alone, whether or not the participant has read the fine article. Until I can read the article (I can't so far after repeated attempts), I'll give some history of how the cholesterol hypothesis was developed.

Ancel Keys, a member of the Terman longitudinal study of high-IQ children and inventor of the K ration for United States soldiers during World War II,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7213-2004Nov2...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/obituaries/23keys.html?_r=...

was active at the University of Minnesota in some key years of his career.

http://mbbnet.umn.edu/firsts/blackburn_h.html

He did studies of human nutrition, including starvation, in an intellectual milieu that included some of the first studies (by other researchers) on surgery to treat heart disease. (It was the surgical research that prompted my mother, a nurse, to move to Minnesota after completing nursing training in another state.) Keys hoped to find a dietary explanation for the prevalence of heart disease in industrialized countries, and he thought his regression methods of statistical analysis pointed to dietary fat and cholesterol as the main risks factors for heart disease. He lived to the age of 100, so it's hard to say that he was completely crazy in his ideas, but the idea that cholesterol intake from the diet alone is the whole story in heart disease rates is now generally discredited, and it is especially controversial to say that a diet of the kind he recommended is as good for all-cause mortality reduction as it appears to be for heart disease reduction.

Like all other members of the Terman longitudinal study, Keys was never awarded the Nobel Prize. Two young people who were rejected for the Terman study (William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) because their IQ scores were too low later went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics (in separate years).

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#143

Post by danielwarna »

latch wrote: post #36

While it's really interesting to debate whether you should eat potatoes or beef, the real battle for the western world is that we stop eating processed foods. Wheat vs eggs seems like a silly debate when people are living off of Coke, Oreos and Capt'N Crunch. Whenever I hear these arguments, I feel like these scientists aren't living in the same world as me. "Eggs are ok, declare scientists" reads the headline while…

I've always found the whole diet debate a bit silly and overly complicated. Most people are probably going to be fine as long they eat a varied diet,don't overeat and get enough physical exercise, with emphasis on the physical exercise. The human body is simply not design to sit on a chair 24/7 no matter how incredibly healthy the food you're eating is.

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#144

Post by pessimizer »

geon wrote: post #94
spitx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please refrain from making these anecdotal observations. Your observation is the equivalent of this from the movie "Get Him To The Greek": "British mother fu##ers don’t die. You ever heard of a British rock and roll star dying? No. They don’t die. Mick Jagger. Keith Richard. Those Led Zeppelin. Themmotherfu##ers old as fuck! Fu##ing Ozzy Osbourne is gonna outlive Miley Cyrus"

Every observation is anecdotal until there are a lot of them.

"The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data"

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#145

Post by analog »

randallsquared wrote: post #141
analog wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you're eating just 300kcal over what you need every day you will become overweight eventually. Edit: for reference 300kcal is about what you'd burn off with a 4 kilometer run.

"Eventually"? That's putting on 30 pounds a year, assuming it's all about (caloriesIn - caloriesUsed) / 3600 = poundsOfFat. Of course, anyone who has dieted long term knows that that's not the whole story. You might cut your calories in half and still plateau within a few months.

As you put on more weight the amount of calories you need increases.

I don't think cutting your calories in half would result in a plateau within a few months in most cases. That's quite a major reduction, pretty much a starvation diet.

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#147

Post by fhoxh »

tokenadult wrote: post #142

Is the link submitted here throwing 403 errors for other HN users? I notice that many comments here on HN could just as well be responding to the bare title alone, whether or not the participant has read the fine article. Until I can read the article (I can't so far after repeated attempts), I'll give some history of how the cholesterol hypothesis was developed. Ancel Keys, a member of the Terman longitudinal study o…

As per his Twitter feed[1]:

"We're being kicked off HostGator for crashing their server due to volume. Working to get a dedicated server. Sorry for inconvenience!"

In the meantime, Google's cache of this article is here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...

And the direct link to his talk [video] is here:

http://vimeo.com/45485034

[1] https://twitter.com/EatLikePete/statuses/225822001154117632

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#148

Post by fhoxh »

jawr wrote: post #93
analog wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...healthiest potato chips on the shelf... ...bread, there is soybean oil mayonnaise... All of these are fairly high calorie foods, even if you buy them in a health food shop. You'd need to have a fast metabolism and be pretty active to get through all these. If you eat more calories than you burn you will put on fat.

I think metabolism is a huge factor when considering the above examples; the guy that eats only healthy foods might not have an efficient metabolism and be doing enough exercise to burn off the calories he is taking in. Also, the big guy that takes loads of pills (e's) and eats what he wants... I don't think this is a good example at all and it sounds like you also take them too (perhaps an explanation for you and yo…

As per his Twitter feed[1]:

"We're being kicked off HostGator for crashing their server due to volume. Working to get a dedicated server. Sorry for inconvenience!"

In the meantime, Google's cache of this article is here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...

And the direct link to his talk [video] is here:

http://vimeo.com/45485034

[1] https://twitter.com/EatLikePete/statuses/225822001154117632

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#149

Post by BSousa »

analog wrote: post #136
BSousa wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the study, only 26.7% difference wasn't explained by age/sex/weight. Which means for almost 75% the values were somehow dependent on sex/age/weight. And the difference between the top 5% and bottom 5% of the outliers was around 30% (which means for a 2000kcal average BMR, the bottom needed only 1700 and top 2300). This, in my opinion, is not enough for people to tout slow/fast metabolism for weight gain/…

Even if you're eating just 300kcal over what you need every day you will become overweight eventually. Edit: for reference 300kcal is about what you'd burn off with a 4 kilometer run.

I'm not saying that eating 300kcal over daily maintenance everyday would not make you fat.

What I'm saying is that I really doubt the most of the people that are overweight/obese are eating according to what a BMR calculator says and because of slow metabolism they are getting fat. Also, body uses more kcals per day than BMR, you also have to take in account the activities per day.

Using Harris Benedict formula:

If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2

If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375

If you are moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55

If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725

If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9

The thing is, most (and I know this is pure observational) people I know that are overweight/obese either underreport calories (they say they eat just a salad, but forget the 5 table spoons of dressing/olive oil they season it with) and over report activity levels (jogging is not moderate exercise!).

I know it isn't data, but my mother and my mother in law are some of the people that most annoys me related to this. They swear they don't eat treats (I see them eating on average 2-3 cake slices or ice creams per week) and they say they only dine salad (but include 2 loafs of bread and a lot of oil based seasonings) and complain they don't lose weight. And this is what I see in about 90% of the people I know that are overweight. Maybe it is cognitive dissonance/bias but some people just believe they can't lose weight, so they bend the truth to support that idea.

ps: sorry to be such a 'asshole' related to this. Fitness and nutrition is a passion of mine, and I hate when people use excuses for their lack of progress, or attribute 'genetics' or 'luck' to my progress (sure, they don't see me at the gym 1.5 hours every day working my ass off, or not eating bread for months at a time.)

Re: How did we come to believe saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for us?

#150

Post by fhoxh »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #126
fhoxh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guyenet is a joke. Peter over at HyperLipid recently ripped him to utter shreds: http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/confused.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/insulin-un-de... Not to mention, Taubes countered Guyenet with a 6-part series refuting Guyenet's widely mocked food-reward/palatability hypothesis: http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ances... http://garytaubes.…

I read through the first 3 of your links by taubes, which all seemed to be extremely verbose sophistry that don't address Guyanet's points at all. At what point does Taubes actually address Guyanet's (clearly stated) claim, that if food is tastier, people eat more of it, consume more calories, and become fatter?

I would say that you might consider reading the complete 6-part series. :-)
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