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Doubling Saturated Fat In Diet Does Not Increase It In Blood
An anonymous reader writes: A new study by researchers at Ohio State University found that dramatically increasing the amount of saturated fat in a person's diet did not increase the amount of saturated fat found in their blood. Professor Jeff Volek, the study's senior author, said it "challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn't correlate with disease."
The study also showed that increasing carbohydrates in the diet led to an increase in a particular fatty acid previous studies have linked to heart disease. Volek continued, "People believe 'you are what you eat,' but in reality, you are what you save from what you eat. The point is you don't necessarily save the saturated fat that you eat. And the primary regulator of what you save in terms of fat is the carbohydrate in your diet. Since more than half of Americans show some signs of carb intolerance, it makes more sense to focus on carb restriction than fat restriction."
The study also showed that increasing carbohydrates in the diet led to an increase in a particular fatty acid previous studies have linked to heart disease. Volek continued, "People believe 'you are what you eat,' but in reality, you are what you save from what you eat. The point is you don't necessarily save the saturated fat that you eat. And the primary regulator of what you save in terms of fat is the carbohydrate in your diet. Since more than half of Americans show some signs of carb intolerance, it makes more sense to focus on carb restriction than fat restriction."
When asked for advice you'll get the best recommendation scientists have at the time it's given. Hopefully it isn't actually completely wrong, backwards, missing a key piece of the puzzle, or just plain lethal. It will always be subject to revision, and in 50 years you might get the exact opposite advice. And that is before we get to misunderstandings by the public, or the results of dumbing down the recommendations to make them more easily understood but not completely correct any more.
Eggs? Coffee? Butter v margarine? Vitamin supplements? ....
Having said that, we need to keep at it with the best tools science has since it is the best way forward and has been proven many times despite being wrong at times.
Now about "global warming" ....
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I tried a "low-cholesterol" diet and it made my lipid profiles worse. I went on cholesterol drugs, and they had awful side effects. Finally I gave up the cholesterol meds and started restricting carbs. My lipid profiles got much better and I've decided to simply live as a "borderline" case without cholesterol meds.
I'm 20 pounds lighter, and I feel a hell of a lot better than on the meds.
I'm not sure medical science understands (well enough) the relationship between carbs/blood sugar/cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. The low-fat diet and food pyramid is probably the worst thing ever foisted on the American people. With 30 years of run-away obesity and diabetes, maybe it's time to admit failure with those recommendations.
We still let cereal manufacturers pitch their wares as "heart-healthy" - what a joke.
Entertaining movie about this:
http://www.fathead-movie.com/
"Calories in, calories out" is given as a good first order approximation of reality for the purposes of weight loss (at least whenever I've seen it). This article isn't about weight loss, it's about health. It's obvious that being conducive to weight loss and being healthy are not synonymous. I could lose weight by eating nothing but cyanide.
Now, it's true that even for weight loss "calories in, calories out" is only an approximation, but based on the admittedly small amount of information I have it is basically the most practically useful one, and using more complex models is counterproductive. Ultimately for most people trying to lose weight the most limiting factor is psychology. If you have some really nice theory about how different nutrients (or even exercise) affect weight differently, chances are you will be tempted to slack off on the by far much more important "calories in, calories out" equation, because you have a limited amount of mental energy. All the physiological tricks mean jack shit if you're inputting too much energy into yourself. Now of course what you eat still matters a lot, but mainly because it affects your psychology differently -- for instance, I've heard many anecdotal reports that 1200 calories from carbs leaves people feeling much less satisfied than the same amount from fat and protein, which of course is going to make it harder for a person not to eat any more. In other words, a corollary to "calories in, calories out" is "find whichever source of calories makes it easiest for you to maintain the equation", but even then physiology matters only in the way that it affects psychology, and not directly because some sources of calories are metabolized differently than others.
weinersmith
All of this has been studied in great detail in the area of sports nutrition. All those athletes whose physiques we all admire eat a lot of food, and they do also eat a lot of carbs. The key to weight loss is two fold:
1. Maintain a _moderate_ caloric deficit given your level of physical activity. Moderate means no more than 300-500 calories deficit per day. You go over that (or go on a diet for too long) and your metabolism adapts to the new calorie intake. Life starts to suck, you have no energy, you get sick more easily.
2. Eat a balanced diet. That includes carbs. If you're physically active, eat 40% of your daily carb intake immediately after you exercise.
Easy right? Nope. #1 requires counting calories. Both #1 and #2 require you to consume meals you've pre-cooked yourself and carried with you, you can't just eyeball the balance of nutrients or calorie contents in a restaurant. That's mostly how athletes get their physiques (the other 40% of it being hard-ass training routine and genetics). Anyone can do it, very few people bother. It's much easier to yo-yo diet on a diet du jour, even though it doesn't help.
Before everyone jumps on the low-carb bandwagon there are a few caveats to note:
1) All the participants had metabolic syndrome so the results might not be generally applicable.
2) The meals were fixed portions, so we don't know how it affected appetite or how it compared to previous eating habits.
3) We don't know what would happen long term. For instance all the participants followed the same pattern of steadily increasing carbs and decreasing fat, so it could be the body reacting to the delta.
I just mention because most people are really interested in the question "if I want to lose weight and/or reduce my risk of heart disease should I eat more/less fat and more/less carbs". But that question is incredibly specific to one person and very poorly defined beyond that. This study says in these very specific circumstances the answer is more fat and less carbs, but that's not necessarily true in general. To think it does give the general answer only sets one up for a future accusation that science is always wrong when a future study with slightly different parameters seems to reach a different conclusion.
I stole this Sig
It seems awfully unscientific to come to any kind of conclusion based on a study of 16 people over a 3 week period with engineered diets.
There is a saturated fat plateau. When you consume enough saturate fats, you cannot absorb them, but that doesn't mean it's a healthy amount to eat.
Add this to the list of misleading studies: http://nutritionfacts.org/vide...
"... consuming so many phytoestrogens than men are growing boobs."
From the National Institutes of Health, a free PDF: The pros and cons of phytoestrogens. The author considered 308 scientific sources and came to the conclusion that not enough is known to indicate that phytoestrogens are good or bad for humans.
trig history pre hi carb, 400. high carb diet, 600. low carb diet back down to 400 then up to 850.
Participants, on average, lost almost 22 pounds by the end of the trial.
So, apparently, more calories went out than in. Which also makes this a poor study. We know that weight loss improves health and risk markers in the blood. Therefore, a study that was designed to measure the effects of macro nutrient distribution now is distorted by the weight loss. What they should have done is pay more attention to keep the total calorie intake the same as the output, so that the overall weight of the test group stays stable.
So, the only psychopaths this policy really benefits are the subset who own or are bribed by Big Pharma, and to a lesser degree the armies of cardiologists and dieticians who service this system
You forget the processed food industry, which has no concerns for your health, and is specifically engineering food to make it as addictive as possible. Unfortunately, a very addictive combination is a 50/50 mixture of sugar and fat. Despite all the dietary science we do, the industry will continue to design food to maximize profits.
Been on this diet for a couple of years now. Works great. I feel awesome and I look awesome, and it doesn't take any real effort. (Though, you have to give blood to keep your iron down, take your magnesium and keep your vitamin C levels up). But if you DO a little training.., wow! Super hero muscles for nothing.
I don't buy the, "Oh, this time next decade, they'll be telling you the exact opposite!" apathetic complaints. People last decade were fat and unhealthy and heart disease was a problem. All the vegetarians I know are either too skinny and malnourished or fat and grey, and all of them are suffering from the brain fog of early onset dementia. God love 'em for their ethics, but honestly! I'd rather kill a cow than have a heart attack at 55. Sorry. I do promise to kill it nicely.
There is a fundamental truth which reality orbits around regardless of what you happen to believe or what the science magazines say. They may tell us the opposite next year, but they'll be wrong at best, and liars at worst.
Ye Olde Science Magazines are no better than religious pamphlets these days, so I'm going to go ahead and trust logic, my own research, community information sharing initiatives and my own five senses on this one, thanks.
I'm sick of trusting authority-based science when they tell me I'm the victim of magic show antics and that my senses are unreliable; that I can only trust my leaders. Fuck that! I know I'm not infallible, but I'm also pretty smart; I'm not a slave to my ego, scared to be wrong. I know how to correct for errors once I detect them. -Like if my gut started expanding and my heart started feeling fluttery and if my skin wasn't glowing with health on this high fat diet, I'd stop and go back to eating wheat and sugar. I don't need some fool in a government lab coat or some pill-salesman to tell me what to think.
I'm just amazed that acceptance of high fat/low carb diets is taking hold. The fact that something works usually means people are running in the opposite direction.
It makes me wonder if perhaps there isn't something worse we're missing which makes the optimal health we're learning to enjoy invalid; what could make lots of strong and healthy people a non-threat to the power establishment I wonder..?
...in "Good Calories, Bad Calories".
Some of it is historical -- prior to the Ancel Keys bad science about diet, it was a commonly held understanding that cutting carbohydrate consumption contributed to weight loss. Taubes cites numerous sources, some dating back hundreds of years. IIRC, even the science was trending this way before WWII but a lot of it was German-led science which the war lost and competitiveness from American scientists chose to bury.
The science behind insulin as the primary hormonal regulator of fat accumulation has been known since the 1960s.
Most troubling from Taubes' book is the weird politics of dietary science and how senior people who control funding for studies get wed to particular theories and hang on to them even when evidence doesn't support them, even suppressing promising science that tends to discredit these ideas.