In a hunter-gatherer context, fat is surplus. And it virtually only comes from animals. Also true in the animal kingdom. Having fat means you're doing better than just surviving. If you drop someone into the woods and check on them later and they've amassed a bunch of fat (killed a moose, bear, etc). then they're clearly very competent.
I guess what I'm saying is it's not surprising that our bodies like it.
The article seems to just concentrate on debunking a single study about margarine which used cherrypicked data, but doesn't really discuss any of the other science into diet and health, so I'm wondering if this article itself is also cherrypicking the data.
This chart looked pretty striking. "Tokelau, Masai, and Inuit populations who consume “extremely” high percentages of saturated fat yet have extremely low rates of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes."
My guess is that there are genetic differences, and possibly environmental triggers that change how humans process foods. So, there’s probably no universal rule. Inuits almost certainly need the fats due to their environment. Sub Saharan Africans probably don’t.
I don't know how true it is, but I remember learning back in elementary school there were cases of Europeans dying from food poisoning after eating some Inuit dishes without proper "training".
Doesn't seem that farfetched. I mean there are well known genetic conditions which cause you to become mentally retarded, if not death, if you eat certain foods (eg PKU). Then there's protective genetic conditions like gilbert's syndrome, mutations which give lactose tolerance for life, hereditary haemochromatosis...
It should be obvious by now that subtle genetic differences can hold a huge influence in regards to what a "healthy" diet for someone is. IMO, there isn't enough research being done on such matters.
I’m inclined to believe (on somewhat shaky grounds, after all I’m a hacker not a doctor) that it’s the combination of fats with highly processed carbohydrates and especially sedentary lifestyles that is devastating.
Best take I've seen on this debate. TLDR, in general its better to recommend a plant majority diet on a population basis but on an individual level, try an elimination diet to see what works and what dosent
I'm not a dietary expert but have you not gone on a Atkins / South Beach / keto / whatever we're calling it this year diet? It's pretty telling. I shed excess weight, I feel amazing and most allergy / autoimmune stuff disappears from my life. The hard part is eating like that the rest of your life.
Even if it did increase risk of heart disease, which I think it most likely does not, I'd rather live a life feeling amazing and die at 75 than feeling subpar all the time living until 95.
All these studies are the same... A gazillion variables that they don't control for or that we don't even know about. On top of that some of those studies are paid for by organisations that have interests. Nutrition is nothing but junk science.
Correlation does not imply causation, as we know. So the fact that fats have been demonized for the last 60 years, while obesity has skyrocketed, doesn't prove anything.
Fats in products were gradually replaced with sugars, so it really is cut and dry. It doesn’t imply that fats are healthy but obesity is exclusively carb related in the overwhelming majority.
And I get at least 50% of my calories from olive oil, and maybe a further 20% from cheese. Given that people from the US make up a little over 4% of the global population they’re not the measuring stick.
> Fats in products were gradually replaced with sugars
Let's experiment with that statement. Perhaps what I'm hypothesizing here is new, perhaps it isn't.
Don't take this as a position to argue with. I really don't have a dog in this fight.
Suppose that people have always been after a certain feeling of fullness, and this feeling is largely a product of evolution. It's also very emotion-driven, not purely physical.
When humans feel full, they stop eating. Of course it doesn't work perfectly, since we've always had fat people. It does happen to work for me and my extended family, since none of us have ever been obese.
Suppose that animal fats, being highly calorie-dense, give a feeling both of being full and being emotionally satisfying. Every chef will tell you that people love fat.
Now, if the food industry and nutrition scientists removed a lot of the animal fats, then both people's physical and emotional needs increased, and many searched for sugars and carbs to compensate. They are a poor substitute, though.
If this were true, then humans are getting more calories than they were when animal fats were a bigger part of the diet. It's not that animal fats are good for you as much as "if you don't consume them, you'll consume other things that are even worse."
Of course this is not a single factor to explain it all. A more sedentary lifestyle is also a big, big part of it.
>Now, if the food industry and nutrition scientists removed a lot of the animal fats, then both people's physical and emotional needs increased, and many searched for sugars and carbs to compensate. They are a poor substitute, though.
Anecdote. I've tested this personally and found it to be true. Gastric motility also increases with high animal fat diets, meaning on some level my body/brain feels like its getting what it requires faster.
I don't like it being flagged, even though I don't agree, since too many HNers believe this nonsense. Ignore the evidence about the dangers of saturated fat (including plant saturated fat) at your peril.
Polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats are fine, but saturated fat (plant or animal), besides increasing your risk of CVD, also decreases insulin sensitivity, something people who flock to faddish fat-heavy diets like keto should be concerned about:
BTW, your body can make all of the saturated fat it needs from the essential unsaturated (o3/o6) fats you consume. It's strange how people say things like "there's no such thing as an essential dietary carbohydrate," but don't acknowledge the same about saturated fat. Also wild game meat isn't nearly as fatty as domesticated meat, and the fat is much less saturated:
> "saturated fat (plant or animal), besides increasing your risk of CVD,"
From an earlier comment of mine referencing a video[1] several meta-analyses over several years and the most expensive study ever done on reducing dietary fat all find no evidence that saturated fat is harmful.
Meanwhile, the evidence causally linking elevated LDL cholesterol across a person's lifetime with the development of CVD is overwhelming, and every intervention that successfully lowers LDL has shown a reduction in CVD morbidity and mortality: by inhibiting synthesis (statins), accelerating clearance (PCSK9 inhibitors; go look at the FOURIER and ODYSSEY trials), or preventing re-absorption (Ezetimibe). Lower LDL just seems to be better. And btw, hunter-gathers have much lower LDL than westerners do--the Hadza for example have LDL in the 70-80 mg/dl even into old age (probably because they're more active, leaner, and don't eat much saturated fat).
Saturated fat downregulates LDL receptors (and in some people, profoundly so), meaning delayed clearance of LDL, and an elevated risk of CVD. Some people aren't as susceptible to this, while others are so-called "hyper-responders." Likewise, some people are "hyper-absorpers" of cholesterol (about 1/5), meaning dietary cholesterol has a major effect on their blood lipids, while it only has a modest effect in most others.
> "every intervention that successfully lowers LDL has shown a reduction in CVD morbidity and mortality: by inhibiting synthesis (statins)"
That's not what I'm reading; published in the British Medical Journal[1] "Drug treatment to reduce cholesterol to new target levels is now recommended [...] Achieving these cholesterol target levels did not confer any additional benefit in a systematic review of 35 randomised controlled trials. [...] The negative results of numerous cholesterol lowering randomised controlled trials call into question the validity of using low density lipoprotein cholesterol as a surrogate target for the prevention of cardiovascular disease."
Or[2] "One problem with all the trials of statins is that they look at the probability of still being alive after x years. But [...] Patients want to know how much longer they can expect to live if they take a statin every day for the rest of their lives. Is it weeks? months? years? decades? [...] In 2015, a group of researchers looked at the data from the statin trials and re-calculated the effect in terms of increased longevity. The study was published in the British Medical Journal [...] So what were the results? Life was prolonged by between -5 and 19 days in the primary prevention trials (yes, that’s -5, as in minus five. In one of the studies people taking a statin lived five days shorter than people taking a placebo). [...] When everything is averaged out, people taking a statin for primary prevention lived three days longer than people in the placebo group."
The video I linked in the previous comments talks about LDL and HDL, and argues that high cholesterol is not inherently bad, it's specifically cholesterol damaged by the presence of sugar in the blood which then means it can't be cleared out in the normal way (specific mechanism is explained) and ends up pulled into the artery walls (by macrophages IIRC), weakening them and contributing to coronary artery disease. That implies that on a standard Western diet which is high fat and high sugar you should see heart disease happen, but either on a very low carb or a very low fat diet you should see improvements (but low fat, high sugar would still give you the other problems of a high sugar diet).
> "the Hadza for example have LDL in the 70-80 mg/dl even into old age (probably because they're more active, leaner, and don't eat much saturated fat)."
Wikipedia[3] says about the Hadza: "only around 400 Hadza still survive exclusively based on the traditional means of foraging[...] A 2001 anthropological study on modern foragers found the Hadza to have an average life expectancy of 33 at birth for both men and women. Life expectancy at age 20 was 39 and the infant mortality rate was 21%.[37] More recently, Hadza adult have frequently lived into their sixties, and some have even reached their seventies or eighties"
So what is "into old age" in your comment, how many people and how old? (For comparison, life expectancy at birth in the USA and UK is >80 years and "the American Heart Association (AHA) state the average age of a person at the time of their first heart attack in the United States is 65.5 years for males and 72 years for females", so if there's only 400 of them living as foragers and it's also rare for them to reach their seventies at all, that doesn't sound much data to draw a conclusion of protection against heart disease).
My favorite game is to google the titles of some of his references, often to find out they were retracted and should have been noted. I chose his #10 and found a rebuttal to key points [1]. I'd suggest going to a plant-based website, one for which advertising does not sell pills or foods, but, instead, supports the non-profit foundation and put "animal" in the search bar [2] or study this clustered search at PubMed [3]
33 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 62.6 ms ] threadI guess what I'm saying is it's not surprising that our bodies like it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4975792/
So much conflicting studies on this, I'm at a loss to what to believe, including this study that points otherwise: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/saturated-f...
It should be obvious by now that subtle genetic differences can hold a huge influence in regards to what a "healthy" diet for someone is. IMO, there isn't enough research being done on such matters.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/high-fat-diet-made-inuits-heal...
There are other reasons, but Inuits also don't live long compare to others. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-inuit/inuit-lifespan-stag...
They also move around much more, don't eat tons of refined carbs and sugars, live in more "sociable" societies, etc.
Best take I've seen on this debate. TLDR, in general its better to recommend a plant majority diet on a population basis but on an individual level, try an elimination diet to see what works and what dosent
Even if it did increase risk of heart disease, which I think it most likely does not, I'd rather live a life feeling amazing and die at 75 than feeling subpar all the time living until 95.
It does make you wonder, though.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/2/14485226/ame...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/81355/December16_Fin...
Many Americans actually get between 10-20% of their daily calories from soybean oil alone.
Let's experiment with that statement. Perhaps what I'm hypothesizing here is new, perhaps it isn't.
Don't take this as a position to argue with. I really don't have a dog in this fight.
Suppose that people have always been after a certain feeling of fullness, and this feeling is largely a product of evolution. It's also very emotion-driven, not purely physical.
When humans feel full, they stop eating. Of course it doesn't work perfectly, since we've always had fat people. It does happen to work for me and my extended family, since none of us have ever been obese.
Suppose that animal fats, being highly calorie-dense, give a feeling both of being full and being emotionally satisfying. Every chef will tell you that people love fat.
Now, if the food industry and nutrition scientists removed a lot of the animal fats, then both people's physical and emotional needs increased, and many searched for sugars and carbs to compensate. They are a poor substitute, though.
If this were true, then humans are getting more calories than they were when animal fats were a bigger part of the diet. It's not that animal fats are good for you as much as "if you don't consume them, you'll consume other things that are even worse."
Of course this is not a single factor to explain it all. A more sedentary lifestyle is also a big, big part of it.
Anecdote. I've tested this personally and found it to be true. Gastric motility also increases with high animal fat diets, meaning on some level my body/brain feels like its getting what it requires faster.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291812/
BTW, your body can make all of the saturated fat it needs from the essential unsaturated (o3/o6) fats you consume. It's strange how people say things like "there's no such thing as an essential dietary carbohydrate," but don't acknowledge the same about saturated fat. Also wild game meat isn't nearly as fatty as domesticated meat, and the fat is much less saturated:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4975792/
From an earlier comment of mine referencing a video[1] several meta-analyses over several years and the most expensive study ever done on reducing dietary fat all find no evidence that saturated fat is harmful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016868
Meanwhile, the evidence causally linking elevated LDL cholesterol across a person's lifetime with the development of CVD is overwhelming, and every intervention that successfully lowers LDL has shown a reduction in CVD morbidity and mortality: by inhibiting synthesis (statins), accelerating clearance (PCSK9 inhibitors; go look at the FOURIER and ODYSSEY trials), or preventing re-absorption (Ezetimibe). Lower LDL just seems to be better. And btw, hunter-gathers have much lower LDL than westerners do--the Hadza for example have LDL in the 70-80 mg/dl even into old age (probably because they're more active, leaner, and don't eat much saturated fat).
Saturated fat downregulates LDL receptors (and in some people, profoundly so), meaning delayed clearance of LDL, and an elevated risk of CVD. Some people aren't as susceptible to this, while others are so-called "hyper-responders." Likewise, some people are "hyper-absorpers" of cholesterol (about 1/5), meaning dietary cholesterol has a major effect on their blood lipids, while it only has a modest effect in most others.
That's not what I'm reading; published in the British Medical Journal[1] "Drug treatment to reduce cholesterol to new target levels is now recommended [...] Achieving these cholesterol target levels did not confer any additional benefit in a systematic review of 35 randomised controlled trials. [...] The negative results of numerous cholesterol lowering randomised controlled trials call into question the validity of using low density lipoprotein cholesterol as a surrogate target for the prevention of cardiovascular disease."
Or[2] "One problem with all the trials of statins is that they look at the probability of still being alive after x years. But [...] Patients want to know how much longer they can expect to live if they take a statin every day for the rest of their lives. Is it weeks? months? years? decades? [...] In 2015, a group of researchers looked at the data from the statin trials and re-calculated the effect in terms of increased longevity. The study was published in the British Medical Journal [...] So what were the results? Life was prolonged by between -5 and 19 days in the primary prevention trials (yes, that’s -5, as in minus five. In one of the studies people taking a statin lived five days shorter than people taking a placebo). [...] When everything is averaged out, people taking a statin for primary prevention lived three days longer than people in the placebo group."
The video I linked in the previous comments talks about LDL and HDL, and argues that high cholesterol is not inherently bad, it's specifically cholesterol damaged by the presence of sugar in the blood which then means it can't be cleared out in the normal way (specific mechanism is explained) and ends up pulled into the artery walls (by macrophages IIRC), weakening them and contributing to coronary artery disease. That implies that on a standard Western diet which is high fat and high sugar you should see heart disease happen, but either on a very low carb or a very low fat diet you should see improvements (but low fat, high sugar would still give you the other problems of a high sugar diet).
> "the Hadza for example have LDL in the 70-80 mg/dl even into old age (probably because they're more active, leaner, and don't eat much saturated fat)."
Wikipedia[3] says about the Hadza: "only around 400 Hadza still survive exclusively based on the traditional means of foraging[...] A 2001 anthropological study on modern foragers found the Hadza to have an average life expectancy of 33 at birth for both men and women. Life expectancy at age 20 was 39 and the infant mortality rate was 21%.[37] More recently, Hadza adult have frequently lived into their sixties, and some have even reached their seventies or eighties"
So what is "into old age" in your comment, how many people and how old? (For comparison, life expectancy at birth in the USA and UK is >80 years and "the American Heart Association (AHA) state the average age of a person at the time of their first heart attack in the United States is 65.5 years for males and 72 years for females", so if there's only 400 of them living as foragers and it's also rare for them to reach their seventies at all, that doesn't sound much data to draw a conclusion of protection against heart disease).
[1] https://junkscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ebm111413...
[2] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/13/how-much-do-statin...
[3] gardenfelder ↗ My favorite game is to google the titles of some of his references, often to find out they were retracted and should have been noted. I chose his #10 and found a rebuttal to key points [1]. I'd suggest going to a plant-based website, one for which advertising does not sell pills or foods, but, instead, supports the non-profit foundation and put "animal" in the search bar [2] or study this clustered search at PubMed [3] gardenfelder ↗ Same author did this:
[1] https://www.alineanutrition.com/2020/07/28/how-state-of-the-...
[2] https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=animal%20fat
[3] https://search.carrot2.org/#/search/pubmed/animal%20fat/tree...
Forks Over Knives Documentary: Debunked with Real Science [1]
[1] https://www.doctorkiltz.com/forks-over-knives-debunked/
Actually, just put this in google: Liam McAuliffe site:doctorkiltz.com