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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 This latest evidence comes from an analysis of previously unpublished data of a large controlled trial conducted in Minnesota nearly 50 years ago, as well as a broader analysis of published data from all similar trials of this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).
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.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
It's not an oops, it was intentional. Selling a few cents of grain based food for several dollars is big business.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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.
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".
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)