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 This latest evidence comes from an analysis of previously unpublished data of a large controlled trial conducted in Minnesota nearly 50 years ago, as well as a broader analysis of published data from all similar trials of this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

[Notorious G]

But, but, but... It must've at some point... The benevolent and omniscient government officials kept telling us, that butter is evil. They could not ban it outright for the adults, insisting on their silly "liberties" and "freedoms, but they did ban it for children. As recently as in 2013!

Oh yeah, the science was settled. Only deniers would ever believe anything but the evils of butter. The. Science. Was. Settled. Anyone not accepting that is in the pocket of "big butter" and should be sent to jail.

Re:and it never did

[whoever57]

I don't think that diet and fitness are a science fail. They are a pseudo-science fail.

These disciplines (if even that word is applicable) have been systematically promulgated without the benefit of real science. Now that real scientific methods are being used, the assumptions that were used to derive the advice people were given are (in many cases) proving to be false.

Re:and it never did

[TechyImmigrant]

But, but, but... It must've at some point... The benevolent and omniscient government officials kept telling us, that butter is evil. They could not ban it outright for the adults, insisting on their silly "liberties" and "freedoms, but they did ban it for children. As recently as in 2013!

Oh yeah, the science was settled. Only deniers would ever believe anything but the evils of butter. The. Science. Was. Settled. Anyone not accepting that is in the pocket of "big butter" and should be sent to jail.

The science was never settled. The research funding dictated who had a voice.

Re:and it never did

[ShanghaiBill]

It reminds me of that scene from "Sleeper" where Woody Allen wakes up 200 years in the future and asks for granola for breakfast, and they wonder why he didn't request "healthy" food like deep fat, and cream pies. That was supposed to be a joke, but actually reflects reality. The high carb diet that we were all told was healthy, turns out to have been an oops.

Re:and it never did

[avandesande]

It's not an oops, it was intentional. Selling a few cents of grain based food for several dollars is big business.

Re:and it never did

[ShanghaiBill]

I don't think that diet and fitness are a science fail. They are a pseudo-science fail.

Plenty of mainstream scientific institutions pushed the "high carb, low fat" diet for an entire generation. The government promoted carbs and spent billions subsidizing high carb diets (and, of course, the subsidies continue to be paid, as all subsidies do, even though they are now recognized as a mistake). To claim that it was all mere pseudo-science is just a No True Scotsman fallacy. Nobody was calling it pseudo-science back in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact it was the opposite: most scientists attacked Atkins and others as "frauds" when they questioned the prevailing dogma.

This was a colossal failure of the scientific establishment, and you cannot just hand-wave that away.

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

[TechyImmigrant]

No it could not. The science of evolution is well founded. Climate science has a harder problem to address, but is as rigorous as is reasonable in the circumstances. Nutritional science is a joke.

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

[Rei]

This sort of thing is what one should expect when you start breaking down categories.

Initially fats were all one category. "Apparently fats are bad - stop eating so much fat." Okay.
Then different categories of fats were studied. "Apparently saturated fats are bad, other fats not as bad." Okay.
Then different types of those were studied. "Apparently monounsaturated fats are pretty good, but when polyunsaturated are concerned, most people get too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3 - and that can be as bad as too much saturated" Okay, this is getting complicated....
Then it keeps going: "Well, when you compare gamma lineolic acid to arachidonic acid...." Stop!

It's not that the earlier data was wrong. It was just categorically too broad. Even knowing statistics about individual chemicals isn't (ideally) enough, because the effects can vary depending on who eats it and how they eat. For example, potatoes: it's a little known fact that letting many types of starches cool (rice, potatoes, pasta) converts readily digestible starches into resistant starches, significantly reducing their caloric content and glycemic load. Or that eating iron-rich foods in many small servings over the course of a day yields significantly more iron absorption than eating the same amount all at once in a single serving. Etc. It's relatively straightforward to gather health data for foods, but often very hard to turn that into "universal recommendations".

This is not surprising, considering ....

[gosand]

Most of the dietary advice we have been fed (pun intended) in the last 50 years or so is not based on any real science.
I could go into details, but I am not the expert. Listen to people much smarter than me. Watch this video as a primer: https://vimeo.com/45485034

Then go read Good Calories Bad Calories, and The Primal Blueprint.

Personally, I have been grain and grain product free for 3 years by following the principles put in the above (and some other) resources. No low-fat BS, no whole-grain BS. No fad diets. I won't preach, just do a little research on your own. Once the physical addiction to carbs/sugar was broken, my body doesn't want them anymore. I'm in my 40s, and I only wish I could have done this earlier in my life.

Re:um duh

[jedidiah]

Much more importantly, butter is a known quantity. Margarine could be ANYTHING.

This completely blows away any comparison you could make between now and when Margarine was first discovered harmful. It started getting a bad rep because of trans fat. But today's margarine has probably been re-formulated to get rid of that.

I dumped margarine before dumping margarine was cool because I didn't trust what it was. That and it tastes like sh*t. Plus I don't actually use enough of butter for it's "evilness" to be a problem.

You know, that whole "moderation" thing...

Re:um duh (the moderation thing is a myth too)

[gosand]

...Plus I don't actually use enough of butter for it's "evilness" to be a problem.

You know, that whole "moderation" thing...

The whole moderation is a myth. I use lots of butter, and olive oil, and coconut oil. Don't believe the BS about saturated fat being bad for you. Don't believe the BS about cholesterol. 80-90% of the cholesterol in your blood is produced by your body, not consumed. It *can* be influenced by what you eat, but in the way that you eat garbage that puts your hormones (insulin and others) on a roller coaster. There is no definitive link between saturated fat and blood cholesterol and heart disease. 50% of people who have heart attacks have "normal" cholesterol levels. Just let that one sink in. And I know there are stats about everything, but that is a big one.

When I started eating this way I weighed 175 lbs. Within 2 months I had dropped 15, and it has stayed off for 3 years - effortlessly - by eating a high-fat, low-carb diet of the best foods I can get. No grains, no grain products, very little to no sugar. It's not hard. I am in fantastic health.

shortcuts

[Lehk228]

tl;dr: there are no shortcuts in nutrition, you can't eat tons of fatty food and be healthy just by eating the right fatty foods, you have to exercise actual self control, and you should exercise too.

Rigorous science?

[mi]

The research funding dictated who had a voice.

And those with the voice, can get more research funding. Is not it nice, when the government is picking winners?

Climate science has a harder problem to address, but is as rigorous as is reasonable in the circumstances.

I wonder, what you mean by "rigorous" here. Lysenko, for example, rigorously persecuted adherents of the reactionary Mendelian genetics. And, when their activities endangered the favor he held with the government, denounced them as "enemies of the people".

Something that could never happen in a free country. Right?

Is it really a reliable scientific theory, if police are called on to silence its opponents?

Re:um duh (the moderation thing is a myth too)

[AthanasiusKircher]

50% of people who have heart attacks have "normal" cholesterol levels. Just let that one sink in. And I know there are stats about everything, but that is a big one.

I don't actually know enough about the context here to evaluate that claim, but more importantly -- your statistic is insufficient to conclude anything.

A statement like "50% of people who have heart attacks have 'normal' cholesterol levels" is absolutely useless for evaluating the potential link between heart attacks and cholesterol without a sense of incidence of "high cholesterol" and "heart attacks" within the population.

Just for a quick statistical primer, imagine the following scenario:

1000 people
100 people have high cholesterol
100 people have heart attacks

Let's take your claim: 50% of people who had heart attacks had normal cholesterol. Knowing the above stats, that implies:

(1) 50% of heart attacks were people with high cholesterol.
(2) Thus, chances of having a heart attack with high cholesterol = 50/100 = 50%.
(3) Chances of having a heart attack without high cholesterol = 50/900 = 5.55%.

Overall, those with high cholesterol have about 9 times greater chance of having a heart attack. High cholesterol appears to be a VERY STRONG PREDICTOR of heart attacks.

(We could go even more extreme and imagine there were 200 people with heart attacks, in which case 100% of people with high cholesterol had heart attacks... even though your "50%" stat is still true. In that case, I think I'd be really concerned if someone had high cholesterol.)

Alternatively, consider a different scenario:

1000 people
400 people have high cholesterol
10 people have heart attacks

Again, using your assumption that 50% of heart attacks are in people with normal cholesterol, that means:

(1) Chances of having a heart attack with high cholesterol = 5/300 = 1.25%.
(2) Chances of having a heart attack with normal cholesterol = 5/600 = 0.83%.

In this case, things are much more equal -- high cholesterol has higher risk, but less than 50% higher.

In this case, heart attacks are much more rare, and high cholesterol might be a factor, but it seems there are a lot of other things to look at.

Bottom line -- your statistic is meaningless without context. Citing a rate of incidence for a subgroup tells you nothing about whether that subgroup is significant or not... you'd need more stats to evaluate your claim. Depending on the larger population stats, your "50%" statistic might even be incredibly strong evidence that high cholesterol is the best factor we have to predict heart attacks... which I think is the opposite point that you wanted us to have "sink in." (I don't think this latter hypothesis is true, merely that your stat is quite ambiguous.)