Replacing Butter With Vegetable Oils Doesn't Decrease Risk of Heart Disease, Says Study (medicalxpress.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional "heart healthy" practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid. The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be done on that front. This latest evidence comes from an analysis of previously unpublished data of a large controlled trial conducted in Minnesota nearly 50 years ago, as well as a broader analysis of published data from all similar trials of this dietary intervention. The analyses show that interventions using linoleic acid-rich oils failed to reduce heart disease and overall mortality even though the intervention reduced cholesterol levels. In the Minnesota study, participants who had greater reduction in serum cholesterol had higher rather than lower risk of death. Two things to note about the study: 75% of the participants left in less than a year (perhaps not uncommon, the study doesn't explain why these people left); the vegetable oils mentioned in the article are not necessarily the most commonly used (which are oils made of olive, sunflower, coconut, and palm).

Comments

and it never did

[turkeydance]

see Scott Adams: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...

Re:and it never did

[ArmoredDragon]

I don't care so much as whether the science is settled so much as dogmatic people that have a certain viewpoint on eating habits that they're hell bent on getting people to follow. Take for example militant vegans who proclaim "there's no reason to eat animal products", or for example, a group calling itself the "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine" who aren't actually physicians, and are in fact just another PETA (with very close ties to PETA) who just sued the FDA because they no longer recommend a daily limit on cholesterol, which was a huge setback to the anti-egg movement.

And while vegans can be militant food activists, they aren't alone. The other group is what I term the "food religion", which is pretty hostile towards anybody who dares tell them that they aren't going to bother (read: waste time and money) with organic food, and are even more hostile against anybody who says heretical things such as "everything you eat is a chemical" or "GMO is safe". Or worse yet, outright trying to get laws passed to ban anything that doesn't fit a vague definition of "natural" under the mistaken belief that "natural is better".

This same group does another very annoying thing to those of us with chronic conditions: Insist that the food you eat causes whatever you might have, insist that they never get sick (and otherwise talk as if they'll live forever,) and all chronic diseases will just go away if you simply switch to organic (and one even suggested homeopathic medicine would fix it in my case.) My way of getting back at them though is that these same people are often fans of a work based on cherry picked data called The China Study, talk about how wonderful Eastern medicine (such as acupuncture) is, and so I just mention that my particular disease (stage 4 chronic kidney disease caused by IgA nephropathy) has a MUCH higher prevalence in Asian countries.

Re:and it never did

[Aighearach]

The researches were saying all along, "don't change your diet; don't stop eating butter; adopt the traditional guidelines of eating a balanced diet with lots of vegetables and not a lot of added sugars or fats."

They were also saying about saturated fat that "it is probably not all saturated fats, we don't know which ones are dangerous yet, don't change your diet just wait for more research to uncover the details." And the news would even repeat that... and then spend 5 minutes talking about how to change your diet to eliminate butter!

People are idiots, and then later when the researchers were proved right in every part of what they were saying... people just blame them for whatever the media said, or wherever pop culture wandered.

Once transfats were found to be harmful, a lot of researchers were saying right away, "this is good news because none of the traditional fats like butter that people miss are high in transfat. This looks like an issue with certain processed fats, and companies can simply change their recipes."

People still can't figure out what the science says. My advice, if you can't follow the details without getting led around by the nose by the media, just eat "grandma foods" and you'll already be following all the best research, medical advice, and government recommendations.

Re:and it never did

[drinkypoo]

The other group is what I term the "food religion", which is pretty hostile towards anybody who dares tell them that they aren't going to bother (read: waste time and money) with organic food, and are even more hostile against anybody who says heretical things such as "everything you eat is a chemical" or "GMO is safe".

But those are stupid things to say. Yes, everything you eat is made of chemicals (I hope that's what you meant) but we are capable of introducing them in quantities and concentrations which are harmful. You don't chug arsenic because it naturally appears in apples. And even selective breeding can produce unsafe results; GMO can produce results that selective breeding can't, and therefore it is at least as unsafe. People should be upset when you say those things, because you're wasting their time.

This same group does another very annoying thing to those of us with chronic conditions: Insist that the food you eat causes whatever you might have, insist that they never get sick (and otherwise talk as if they'll live forever,) and all chronic diseases will just go away if you simply switch to organic (and one even suggested homeopathic medicine would fix it in my case.)

I get sick about as much as other people. The food you eat probably does at minimum exacerbate your condition, especially if you're this defensive about it; you probably know better. And actually eating genuinely organic food, not just USDA organic but actually as part of a cyclical system which maintains soil biodiversity, might in fact help. You'd also be expected to eat your food minimally processed, since a lot of common processing destroys enzymes that help break down food and even regulate blood sugar. But you'd also have to watch your diet in other ways; the single best thing the average person can do is cut their sugar intake. Sugar interferes negatively with immune response, and most of what most people eat contains a lot of needless added sugar, so their immune system is really only working properly for a few hours before they wake up.

Re:and it never did

[AthanasiusKircher]

Recommendations where based on the best science we knew at at the time. However, that science was still in the very early stages.

No, that's not quite true. As with many studies in science, there were broad conclusions drawn on the basis of indirect data. It's very common to read a study that collected data on A and B, but the "discussion section" at the end notes that B is also potentially related to C and D.

Other articles note this potential association connecting A to C and D, and eventually that becomes dogma within a discipline... unless it is tested directly. Example in nutritional science is the old belief that all high-cholesterol foods (e.g., eggs) must be bad because high blood cholesterol levels seem to be bad. Except no one until recently really tried to consider whether high-cholesterol foods actually CAUSE high blood cholesterol levels. Turns out they have a relatively small impact, because the body manufactures most of the cholesterol within the body. So intake of cholesterol often has a relatively small impact compared to internal body regulation and function.

Thus, the "science" wasn't really "in the early stages." Instead, people made broad assumptions based on incorrect physical models. They measured a correlation between A and B, but assumed it must apply to cases involving C, D, E, and F, just because it seemed "intuitive." But "intuition" is not science, and models based on no empirical evidence (as many physiological assumptions were in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which laid the basis for nutrition science until recently) aren't very good science. It wasn't just "in the early stages" -- it was really incomplete and rife with unsupported conclusions.

There are lots of things we can say in general and while they are right on average within people of the similar descent they won't be anywhere close to absolute.

One of the fascinating things about biology is there are experiments I can do 100x and get almost that many different results. Biology has randomness, it has mutations, and nothing is every simple.

What you say is true -- and it is quite hard to design good experiments on something as broad as nutrition, which usually has huge numbers of uncontrolled variables. It's not just "randomness," though. It's that it's really expensive and difficult to do studies where you lock people up for a few years and control their complete dietary input... which is what you'd really need to do a proper test of many nutritional hypotheses. And you're right that there are variations in genetics and individuals that sometimes argue against generalizations.

On the other hand, many of the BIG failures in nutritional science weren't due to these little nuances of individuals. They were based on broad misinterpretations of data and drawing overly broad conclusions from that data... usually based on all sorts of underlying assumptions that were never tested directly.

These are flaws in the way scientific methods were applied. And they shouldn't just be "swept under the rug" because "humans are complex and we now realize that more."

Re:This is not surprising, considering ....

[delt0r]

You know most of the diet advice we get now is not based on any science either. A huge chunk of mainstream is made up. And even worse very few studies be honest with the statistics.

Lies, Dam Lies and then there is Statistics.