I heard that there is no science that proves saturated fats cause heart disease. Is that true? What they said is that the science comes from studies on statins which can prevent heart disease and also lowers cholesterol. They took this data and concluded that lowering cholesterol prevents heart disease (which implies a low saturated fat diet because it raises cholesterol).
Is this accurate?
If there is science that says saturated fats cause heart disease, have they ever broken out the data between "good" saturated fats and "bad" saturated fats? For example, butter from grass-fed cows, meat from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals and coconut oil are surely healthier than fast food cheeseburgers, processed nitrate-laden meat and factory-farmed beef. I would not recommend the later but I believe the former to be part of a balanced diet.
"Conclusions: A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat."
Jaxon Flores
I suspect a lot of it has to do with activity level as well as relative level of intake vs TDEE.
A totally sedentary person eating a substantial caloric surplus would be much more susceptible to the effects of arterial plaque buildup, whereas someone on a "clean bulk" who does a lot of cardio wouldn't hardly have any buildup.
Translation: Pretty much anything in moderation is fine, and pretty much anything to excess will kill you.
To be fair, my main source of information on this is my own rectum. I also ran this by my brother, who is a scientist, and he agrees.
Jordan Williams
What you've read is nonsense. There's decades of data linking cholesterol to heart disease, and saturated fat to both increased cholesterol and heart disease.
If you watch this video, you can see how these researchers came to their conclusions youtube.com/watch?v=a-Tx9dCbv-g It's actually a good watch to see the pitfalls of certain study designs
Gabriel Cox
Devil's advocate: They've linked saturated fat to cholesterol and separately they've linked cholesterol to heart disease. But are we 100% sure that links saturated fat to heart disease?
If this were a math class, the answer is yes. But it's not, the human body and diet is very complex. Did you know that 50% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels?
Kevin Scott
I'm with you on the exercise part.
Where I have beef is with the current dietary guidelines. A sedentary person eating the government-approved 60% carb diet will get sick and fat. Take that same person who doesn't work out and put them on a ketogenic diet and their body fat will drop off them, their blood sugar will lower, their blood triglycerides will fall and while their cholesterol levels will raise, their rations will improve (increased HDL and improved total:HDL ratio).
Jonathan Clark
As that meta-analysis shows, some studies show the direct connection, some don't, depending on the study design. Saturated fat and cholesterol aren't really something you can separate though. >Did you know that 50% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels? Prompting scientists to lower the threshold of what we consider "normal cholesterol"
As for >have they ever broken out the data between "good" saturated fats and "bad" saturated fats? For example, butter from grass-fed cows, meat from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals and coconut oil are surely healthier than fast food cheeseburgers, processed nitrate-laden meat and factory-farmed beef
This has been done. Short and medium chain saturated fats don't seem harmful, but the long-chain saturated fats like palmitic, myristic, and lauric acid raise cholesterol and heart disease risk. However, foods high in short and medium chain saturated fats also tend to have a significant amount of long-chain SFA.
Isaiah Walker
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Joseph Harris
the real question is if you can trust the old nutrition science at all.
I'll have to look into short, medium and long chain fatty acids. Thanks!
>Prompting scientists to lower the threshold of what we consider "normal cholesterol"
I believe this to be misguided. Your body needs cholesterol. It is the mother of all hormones and a repair molecule. Two important points:
1) In the statin drug trials, it is often found that while death from heart disease goes down, all cause mortality goes up, especially from diseases like cancer. Sometimes it's a wash in these studies.
2) Elderly people with the highest cholesterol levels live the longest.
These are two important points in the "cholesterol is evil mantra." Furthermore, statins age you.
I've heard that the only subgroup of people who benefit from statins is middle aged men with heart disease. But the pharmaceutical industry wants everyone on them.
>saturated fat also increases HDL It primarily raises LDL bmj.com/content/314/7074/112.long Higher HDL due to nutritional factors rather than lifestyle factors is also not known to be protective health.harvard.edu/heart-health/rethinking-good-cholesterol >and the LDL that it raises is a subtype of big, fluffy particles that are generally benign Not at all true, even though you sometimes see shills try to call it "big and fluffy" to make you think it's harmless. The idea that large LDL aren't atherogenic comes from a few studies where small LDL, which is associated with diabetes (a heart disease risk factor), confounded the relationship of the larger LDL size to heart disease athero.org/commentaries/comm564.pdf
Basically, when you read about how the vast majority of scientists are wrong about something that's been extensively studied for decades, especially when conspiracy theories are thrown in you're more than likely reading something that is either completely false or is being cherrypicked heavily
Aiden Edwards
Oh snap! That's a very good point. Seems to me that the dietary guidelines have been subverted by industry influence to maximize profits, not necessarily promote public health.
Charles Anderson
Think of the money and resources being used by the sugar, meat and dairy industry to make you consume their products. Look at studies that are not sponsored by these industries or any other.
Jaxson James
>I believe this to be misguided. Your body needs cholesterol True, but how much? The people who first discovered the LDL receptors argued that an LDL level of 30mg/dl in the blood was enough for it to serve its purpose. Why then would we need 100+? Also, the cholesterol used in hormone synthesis is not the cholesterol in your blood. Your hormone-making cells produce cholesterol on-site.
>1) In the statin drug trials, it is often found that while death from heart disease goes down, all cause mortality goes up Key word being drug. Drugs have side effects. Some are safer than others, although diet is seen as the first thing to focus on. >2) Elderly people with the highest cholesterol levels live the longest. I know what paper you're talking about and it's a form of cherrypicking. This would be called survivorship bias, where by excluding the majority of people who would be effected by the factor in question and only looking at the statistically altered end result, you're getting data that will inevitably support the hypothesis. In other words, if most people die of heart disease before you started collecting data, you're left with people who are still alive because they were lucky enough to not have died of heart disease, while all those that did don't count as data points because they were purposely excluded. Add in the fact that cholesterol tends to fall in the elderly due to a number of other factors and it's clearly not a good sample to base conclusions on.
Andrew Robinson
>Oh snap! That's a very good point Don't give him credit for that red herring. Government guidelines don't say "stop eating saturated fat and start eating more sugar." They put sugar in the same boat as something to avoid.
Thomas Young
They don't say that explicitly but they do say limit fats, especially saturated fat and eat lots of carbs: fruit, veggies and 6-8 servings of grains. Not sure where you live but where I live I can only think of 1-2 grain products sold at stores I would consider somewhat healthy. Most of the junk on the shelves contain enriched flour, added sugars, gmo/glyphosate-laden wheat, etc. We're supposed to eat 6-8 servings of this junk that our bodies have never experienced throughout all of human history. And get rid of natural fats and replace them with processed oils.
If saturated fat is so evil, why was the first recorded heart attack in 1920 when people were consuming full-fat diary, meat with the fat and what seemed like butter with every dish. (They didn't steam their vegetables). I think this is the hardest thing for any scientist to explain. Heart disease is a new development that seems to correlate with the history of processed foods. Sure there was an isolated case here and there but it only became rampant in the 20th century.
Nathaniel Scott
I should have added that many grain products are almost equivalent to table sugar because of how they are processed.
Nathaniel Russell
They recommend a third of your calories come from fat and push poly and mono unsaturated fats pretty hard. > eat lots of carbs: fruit, veggies and 6-8 servings of grains. Whole grains specifically, which is important to distinguish. You have pop tarts and cheeze-its on your mind, and that's wrong. >We're supposed to eat 6-8 servings of this junk that our bodies have never experienced throughout all of human history. Again, whole grains, which are not new to the human diet. Also keep in mind that 1 serving is about 100 calories. 6 servings of whole grains is equivalent to 1 cup of dry brown rice. You think that's crazy? > And get rid of natural fats and replace them with processed oils. Not everything natural is good for you. I would agree that it's better to get unsaturated fats from whole foods like nuts and seeds, but if you squeeze the oil out of a walnut and eat that, it's still better than butter or lard. >If saturated fat is so evil, why was the first recorded heart attack in 1920 when people were consuming full-fat diary, meat with the fat and what seemed like butter with every dish. (They didn't steam their vegetables). I think this is the hardest thing for any scientist to explain. >Heart disease is a new development For one, we didn't even really understand what heart disease was until fairly recently, and with today's knowledge have gone back and documented it as far back as ancient egypt ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25667089 If you have trustworthy statistics on heart disease in the US in the 1920s, I'd like to read it, but it doesn't seem like a strong scientific basis to ignore the overall body of evidence. With today's sedentary lifestyle, massive obesity rates, and both sugar and saturated fat intake, it's obvious that heart disease is more of a problem now than ever before though.
Thomas Gray
Read "A big fat surprise". It's full of clinical research results rather than poor epidemiology questionnaires.
The actual problem is processed foods and fats. The cholesterol actually helps the human body in all sorts of ways. Most notably, it patches up holes and inflamation in the circulatory system. Which is mostly brought on by mindless and reckless over consumption consumption Eliminating cholesterol from your diet to prevent heart disease is the equivalent of setting your wallet on fire to prevent theft.
Tyler White
>if something serves a biological purpose, there is no limit to how much should be floating around in your blood at any one time Do you really think this?
