Live data from Hacker News

Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

ucsf.edu

121–130 of 537 posts

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#121
post #12

When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it. So the money quote seems to be: > The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats. They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nu…

You're right to be skeptical, but: > They paid a total of 2 people $50,000. That's over half a million, in today's dollars. With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.

No, that's already inflation adjusted.

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#123
A good book that explains it all is The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes, which came out the same year as this article.

Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.

To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#124

This isn't really a correct narrative. Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with CVD. Sugar is also correlated with poor metabolic health which is also correlated with CVD. Both are bad. Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.

Fruit and veg can be contaminated with sprays as well unfortunately.

The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.

I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#125
post #12

When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it. So the money quote seems to be: > The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats. They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nu…

You're right to be skeptical, but: > They paid a total of 2 people $50,000. That's over half a million, in today's dollars. With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.

The $50k is already adjusted for inflation.

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#126
post #2

This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the last one. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx... I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change. Edit: The new guidelines…

It's a "meme" that sugar is worse for you than fat?

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#127
(2016)

Some other discussions:

2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962750

2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32978590

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183

and on and on...

2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's a confluence of various factors. Explosive population growth, for example. The modern economy (of which fiat currency plays a pivotal role) relies on that of course, as the lending system is a bet on future growth. If that fails the whole thing can enter a state of catastrophic failure. But population growth has more precedence. Fiat currency, bureaucratization, etc. were adopted as reactions to increasingly exp…

Huh, what? Population increased a lot in the 19th century, and many countries did not have fiat currencies back then; and the price level most went down slowly as the population grew.

(Modern day 2%-ish stable inflation is mostly fine for the economy, even if it technically erodes the value of money in the long term. The classic pre-WW1 gold standard was also fine-ish. The Frankenstein gold standard-ish they until the 1970s was bad. And so was the rampant inflation that followed for a while.)

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#129
post #12

When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it. So the money quote seems to be: > The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats. They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nu…

I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books. Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for dec…

>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.

You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).

Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?

Re: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

#130
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really reducing a whole economic situation to a currency issue ?

It's not just a currency issue; inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage, and the issue we're facing is that the purchasing power of people's wages is less. If their wages were denominated in a unit of account that wasn't continuously losing value, they wouldn't be continuously losing purchasing power. The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current…

> inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage

So what? Nominal wages can go up just fine. They do that all the time.

> it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money

No. That would only be true, if economic actors were too stupid to anticipate expected inflation. People ain't that stupid.

Post reply on HN