When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it.
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research.
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
I would caution that just because your body can make something doesn't mean it will have optimal performance when doing so. People in ketosis do have worse peak performance in sports than those that eat more carbs/sugar.
That has nothing to do with whether excesses of those nutrients cause cardiovascular disease, though. The general consensus is that the healthiest diet is one with 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat. For most people, it's necessary to restrict saturated fat to land in that range. We also need to distinguish between sugar and carbohydrates. Again, the general consensus is that intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates should be minimized, while 50-75% of total calories should come from sources of complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
Carbohydrates are sugars (from the first sentence on wikipedia): "A carbohydrate (/ˌkɑːrboʊˈhaɪdreɪt/) is a sugar (saccharide) or a sugar derivative." Saying you need "50-75% of your energy from [sugar]" illustrates why that is a somewhat odd statement. Yes, glucose is much better than fructose, but eating a ton of glucose will still lead to high insulin spikes and inflammatory diseases. Complex carbohydrates are better in that they take longer to digest, not because they're magically different. Vegetables are good for nutrients not because you need their carbs.
GP was talking specifically about calories, not other nutrients. My impression is when a vegetable provides significant calorie content it tends to be in the form of carbohydrates.
You have to get your calories (ie raw energy) from somewhere. If you limit saturated fat to 10% then what's left for the other 90% is (roughly speaking) unsaturated fat, simple sugars, carbohydrates (ie complex sugars), and protein. In terms of long term habits converting protein to calories is probably not a great choice for your health. If you decide to go for complex carbohydrates over various oils then vegetables that provide those are a good option.
People are on ketogenic diets for years and even decades with no adverse affects. There's nothing wrong with getting energy from other sources, your body can manage it fine.
Ketogenic diets are high fat. I suggested that a diet where the bulk of your calories comes from protein (not lipids, carbohydrates, or simple sugars) was probably not great for your health.
Your body can certainly "manage" on a high protein low fat low carb diet but I don't understand it to be good for you.
Funny you should say that after today's FDA announcement. (Not taking any side here just interested in how we determine what is a consensus these days)
It's hard, because when an issue becomes politicized everyone has their own preferred "consensus". I would say it should come from the scientific community, not government agencies. Sometimes government agencies agree with the scientific consensus, but not always.
My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
There is a third option: looking at the diets of your closest ancestors with the best longevity.
There may be a misconception that there is one single best diet for everyone, when in reality we people (over generations) evolve with our diets, and your best diet and my best diet may be completely different.
The problem with using science as a guide is that there are just too many variables and not enough time, data and money to isolate them all sufficiently.
However that is distinct from the idea that too much of something like refined sugar might be unhealthy for just about everyone. So science does have an important role to play, I just don't think it's advanced far enough to fully answer the question for everyone.
Looks like it's true that low-carb adapted athletes rely more on fat oxidation during exercise but performance suffers nonetheless because of increased oxygen demands that basically cannot be met.
Your entire argument here applies in the other direction as well. You do not need dietary saturated fats, and sugar has all sorts of uses biologically.
That is only partly true: you don't need dietary saturated fats, but you do need essential fats (omega-3 and omega-6), which are polyunsaturated. However, sugar does not have all sorts of uses biologically; it has only one: as one (but not the only one) source of energy.
> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
I think the benefits of "low fat" may have been dulled by how literally people took that message, and what companies replaced the fat with.
Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right?
Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right?
In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle.
At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better.
Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. )
Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
Agreed, this is a big part of the problem. The average person doesn't have anything resembling a coherent mental model of nutrition, and vague conflicting nutritional advice only adds to the confusion. The average person doesn't even know what a carb is, much less understand the biochemistry of how their body processes one.
Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.
The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
I disagree. Demand is the big problem, not supply.
The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus.
Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public.
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.
I call this the "Everything in Moderation" fallacy. From what I've heard people who say it, they emphasize the everything part of it. In other words almost everything is bad for you so just eat a little bit of everything and you won't get too much of the bad stuff. It's maddening.
The way I understand it (and my understanding is certainly poor, so I welcome well-supported pushback on it), is that few, if any, components in the food that we in developed countries eat today are actively harmful in themselves (with the caveat outlined below)
The main issue is overconsumption leading to overweight and obesity. Food that’s high in refined sugars and/or saturated fats tend to contribute to this, because it’s palatable and calorie-dense
So in that sense, yes - I believe that as long as your diet is varied enough that you get sufficient intake of all, or at least most, of the essential nutrients, and you don’t eat too much (i.e. in moderation), the ratio of macronutrients doesn’t make a big difference to your health outcome
The crux is that moderation is hard when the food is jam-packed with calories, and it’s so delicious you just want to keep stuffing your face
By volume most of the food in modern western grocery stores is unnaturally sugary or otherwise calorie dense.
You have to restrict yourself to produce and a few scant other options to escape with balanced nutritional products.
They even advertise cereals as a "part of a healthy breakfast". Which is a lie under any circumstances, because it's never a healthy part if you eat it long term. (Yes it could keep you from starving to death in a famine, still not 'healthy'.) Imagine if they could only say "it will keep you from starving, and may significantly contribute to diabetes"
I don’t think “Everything in Moderation” means you won’t get too much of the bad stuff. The philosophy alludes to the fact that in the modern world, trying to have the ideal diet is exhausting and near impossible. Lack of choice, money, time, education, self control etc. all contribute to you intentionally or unintentionally eating stuff that’s going to do irreparable harm to you. You could be eating salads and somehow poisoning yourself with pesticides and high sugar/fat/sodium salad dressings. Which is why this philosophy focuses on, do everything in moderation and you’ll maybe avoid CVD and other diseases for longer. It is meant for people who cannot meet the idealistic standards of what you are supposed to do.
Is it really that exhausting though? I've been on a zero-carb diet for two months (other than thanksgiving or christmas), and it really hasn't been hard at all. If I eat at a restaurant there's some things I can't avoid (seed oils), but otherwise it's not too hard to look at a menu and see things I can eat. The only hard part is to be optimally healthy I need to cook for myself, but that's always been true.
In a lot of ways, it's actually been easier. Because my blood sugar isn't crashing every few hours, I can easily skip a meal and feel perfectly fine. Fasting is very easy for me now, which it wasn't at all on an unhealthy diet.
Yet you are unavoidably eating micro-plastics too, which have been linked to adverse CV events.
Also:
- If you are eating more fish (as opposed to eating meat), you are likely consuming more mercury.
- If you are eating more fresh veggies you are probably ingesting more pesticides.
- If you are easting dark chocolate for its health benefits, you are also ingesting cadmium and other heavy metals.
So all the above should be done in moderation. Even things that seem like unalloyed good can be dangerous. A burst of exercise beyond your conditioning can lead to a CV event. Too much water can be poisonous. Some people get constipation for too much veggies in their diet.
For example, instead to sticking to a narrow faddish supposedly healthy diet, you can enjoy a wide range of foods, which will make it more likely you are getting all the nutrients that will do you good (of course clearly unhealthy food should be avoided).
The body is more complex than we can ever know. There are some general principles for good health (including CV health) that should be followed, but to me it is clear that good health does not arise from a slavish devotion to very detailed set of rules.
Funnily I've heard that one reason why obesity is prevalent is that we have too many variations of food. Seems like our hunger controller suspends satiety when we eat a food too much, but when we eat few of lots of different foods, it's broken.
It'd be funny if lots of fad diets actually works because people are forced to eat a single type of food and that's entirely enough for it.
Your post sounds like "bad things can happen so why bother". Having a good diet isn't "slavish devotion", it's more like "don't eat something obviously terrible"
People who don’t make money, have to take care of childcare while working 2-3 jobs, probably aren’t able to cook themselves. Nor are the people who live in food deserts that only have limited options able to optimize around a specific diet that’s not restricted by availability.
I cook my own food and optimize around eating healthy. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I made less money or had a more demanding job or didn’t have great grocery stores in a 10 mile radius or had to spend time in childcare or any of the other completely valid reasons people have.
Besides, you yourself just described “do things in moderation” yourself: holidays, Christmas, restaurants etc. That’s really what the philosophy is.
What is moderation? The volume (or mass) of a single apple of alcohol is going to make you very drunk (most alcohol is mixed with water: an apple's worth of beer is very little, that much Everclear is a problem).
That is what I hate about the everything in moderation. We need to do better since some things should be in much larger amounts than others.
I think we all would agree that any amount of rat poison is a bad thing, thought perhaps this is too much of a strawman.
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
The 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has.
US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified.
Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
Sure, that’s a reasonable take, but satiety research was also far less developed.
The general understanding at the time was basically a full stomach tells people they have eaten enough. We didn’t understand the multiple systems the body uses to adjust the hunger drive and how much a high carb low fat diet messes with them.
> I'm sorry, but this is simply nonsensical. Calories were EVERYTHING among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
Less vilified is on a relative scale, I was alive back then and there was plenty of nonsensical low calorie diets being promoted. However you also saw crap like the Fruitarian Diet where unlimited fruit meant people could actually gain weight on a diet that also gave them multiple nutritional deficiencies.
Low fat dieting is in part from that same mindset as fruitarian diet where it’s not the calories that are the issue but the types of food you were eating. Digging just a little deeper these ideas made more sense before global supply chains and highly processed foods showed up. Culture can be a lot slower to adapt than technology or economics, diet advice from your grandparents could be wildly out of date. Cutting X means something very different when you have 20 available foods vs 20,000.
The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.
Taking the cream out is (by some diet theories) bad. The fat in whole milk slows down the absorption of lactose, leading to a slower rise in blood glucose compared to skim milk. Whole milk is more satiating as well, because of the fat.
If you are trying to have some reasonable balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet, pushing kids from whole to skim milk is going to move the diet towards consuming more sugar/carbs, even if you have a seperate rule trying to tighten sugar consumption.
When you take a high satiety, high fat item, and replace it with a non-fat, low satiety item, you are in effect replacing fat with sugar, because you will eat/drink more of it to get same number of calories, and same amount of fullness.
Drink a glass of whole milk, then drink a cup of skim milk and tell me there is no difference. Try the same with full fat yogurt and non-fat yogurt. Big difference in satiety, but more importantly blood sugar response. Roughly the same amount of fat in a glass of whole milk as 1/4 pound burger.
I don't think anyone ( at least around me ) is drinking milk based drink twice as much just because they feel like they get less energy per drink from skimmed milk.
You are making an argument that people do so, do you have any evidence for this ?
>Big difference in satiety, but more importantly blood sugar response.
There is a negligible difference in glycemic index / glycemic load between the variations of M.F. milk products. Some analysis has skim milk as having a lower GI.
Unflavoured Milk is not relevant to the GI conversation.
Skim milk is not "low fat". It is fat free. In the US milk labeled as low fat is 1% or 2% milk fat (usually 2%). Whole milk is around 4%. Skim milk rounds to 0%.
Is it added deliberately or just concentrated as a side-effect? Say fat comprised, let me guess, 5% of whole milk volume. If you take away this 5% v/v component, now everything else in one liter of skim milk is 5% concentrated by comparison, unless they add water.
>which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
This is not accurate.
No they didn't "replace" the fats with sugar. There is a chocolate milk option, just as there was before, but all options need to be 1% or low M.F., which nutrition and medical science overwhelmingly supports.
Is chocolate milk not ideal? Of course. We all know that. They shouldn't serve it either.
Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.
the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal.
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated. How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding? How many have been criminally investigated?
my own institution launched an internal investigation into a professor who i know for a fact committed fraud and was "unable to prove intentional wrongdoing". academic institutions have taken the "this never happens because we are morally pure" approach which we all know is a load of baloney, they are perversely incentivized to never admit fraud.
the witness and reportee who i am friends with was directly instructed by this professor to falsify data in a more positive light in order to impress grant funders. multiple people were in attendance in this meeting but even that was not enough to see any disciplinary action.
duke also has a notorious reputation for being a fraud mill.
Note both those guys were found guilty for taking government money under false pretenses (to do with fake science, not for doing fake science, which is more supporting evidence that fake science is legal.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
> The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
You probably only need 15% of congress. Some of the unbought ones will follow, some would vote for your side anyway, and there are often unrelated things in the bill that will bring a bunch of those who otherwise don't care about this issue with.
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
If you have a randomized controlled trial, the sugar dose is varied and other confounding variables are controlled by randomization. So you measure the causal impact of sugar only. There are studies showing that.
With observational studies, if you have a dose-dependent effect, then that's good evidence (although not completely conclusive) of a causal relationship. This is what many studies do.
If you have a meta analysis covering many primary studies, and if those vary a lot of context (i.e. countries, year, composition of the population), and you still get a consistent effect, then that's another piece of support for a causal relationship.
The few studies that I've looked at seem to show a pretty robust picture of sugar being a cause, but there might be selection bias - i.e. we'd need an umbrella / meta meta study (which ideally accounts for publication bias) to get the best estimate possible.
Observational studies, and meta analyses relying on them, don't resolve the fundamental problem of causal inference. The best you can do without an experiment is a really clean natural experiment, but those are rare. It's hard to credibly establish a causal relationship without a robust experiment.
What are "the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?" It's been my observation that soda drinkers drink soda all day, no matter what they are doing.
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).
To be true to Taubes, my memory was too approximate. The actual claim was that in 1976 Fred Stare, the director and founder (in 1942) of the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health was exposed by Michael Jacobson having received around 200.000 dollars in the course of the preceding 3 years from Kellogg's, Nabisco e and their foundations, after he had testified before the Congress about the virtues of cereal as a breakfast food. Apparently this discredited Stare as a scientist.
Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac...
And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either.
I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
Average home price in the late 60s was 25k so even if it is equivalent to $50k in 2016 dollars, 25k could still get you further than today in some specific areas.
Some clarification as the actual numbers and the random 25k number keep getting compared to the wrong contexts in this chain (it originally arose as a misunderstanding that the 50k was already in terms of 2016 dollars instead of the original 1960s payment https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CodeWriter23):
~$6,000-$7,000 is the amount the researchers were paid off with in the mid 60s. This is roughly equivalent to ~$50,000 in 2016 when using CPI-U figures.
$25,000 in the mid 60s would be equivalent to ~$193,000 by the same measure, and does not relate to $50,000 in 2016 in any way.
But your core point that the items in the CPI-U basket do not adjust equally, which is why it's a basket in the first place. Median housing price in 2016 was ~$300,000, so ~$193,000 is a bit of variance... but not nearly as much as mixing the numbers from the different comparisons made it sound.
Did you know the average bribe accepted for a politician is something like 5K (This was from a few years back so probably higher now). So yeah this is totally within bribe limits.
As a unrelated note it really is depressing to think about how easy it is to buy off politicians and how much money the bribers have vs an average person.
$25,000 in 1969 has the same buying power as approximately $220,000 to $226,000 today
In terms of 2016, from gemini:
> In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.
> Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period
People are just downvoting you rather than discussing for some reason. It drives me bonkers when I see that happen here... :).
rendaw was pointing out the $50k in the article & parent comment was in terms of 2016 dollars, not that the mid 60s $25k in CodeWrite23's comment converts to $50k in 2016.
I.e. that the researchers would not be getting anything close to a house + charger + spare change for just half the $50k amount. They got more like $6k-$7k at time of payment in the mid 60s. Which is still a good chunk of change for the time... just not the amounts it was made to sound.
I doubt that the 50k was given to the research as personal pay. It was likely a “research grant” that was used to fund the research and/or get swallowed up as “overhead” by the university
Or maybe the combination is the problem. I couldn’t consume much sugar on its own nor much cream but put the two together in ice cream and I could eat it all day long.
That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
>That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
This logic is faulty because both vegans and keto/carnivore people are selected for adherence to diets. If you can stick to either dietary restrictions, you can probably also not pig out on pop tarts or whatever.
That is incorrect, actually. I find it relatively easy to adhere to keto diet. But the moment I try to introduce more "diverse" foods, I gain weight.
Because processed food diet is IMPOSSIBLE to adhere to without gaining weight. Caloric restriction simply doesn't work - your body wants nutrients, not just calories. Which is to say, your willpower will fail sooner or later, unless you find a way of satisfying nutritional needs without excess caloric intake.
>That is incorrect, actually. I find it relatively easy to adhere to keto diet. But the moment I try to introduce more "diverse" foods, I gain weight.
Keto diets might be easier to stick to than calorie counting or whatever, but the fact that you bothered with a diet at all means you're selecting for people who care about their health.
There is also a high chance you selected for people who were not eating well before. Or you selected for people that for genetic reasons are more likely to get fat.
Either way you cannot be sure your selection applies to other people.
GP didn’t say processed foods, but I can see why you went there because it’s a good point. That said, there are also those of us who can’t function without carbs (e.g. if I don’t eat them I will be too weak to work out or run, get light-headed, etc.).
That doesn’t mean they have to be processed, though, or that it requires gaining weight along with them. I personally survive primarily off of clean meats and homemade sourdough bread (which has literally 4 ingredients). If I cut out the bread I get hypoglycemic after runs and pass out. And with it, my weight stays around the same (though I’ve lost maybe 30lb in the last year or so due to just running more and lifting less).
Edit: and when I say “clean meats” I do not mean “lean” meats. Plenty of saturated fats. My bloodwork and other vitals are probably the best my doctor sees all year.
Nobody cares about fat, except as it influences how well they look. They care about good health. There are many people who would be happy to sit in a wheelchair all day (they probably don't know how uncomfortable that is and would demand extra comfort, but the idea). People don't want to exercise (in general). They want to eat good tasting food. They want to drink, smoke, and do other drugs. They want whatever their religion says is good.
Because these are often in conflict they must compromise something. If you find a way to be fat while: looking good, living a long life, and being able to do the other things in life you want through life people would be happy.
Of course being fat correlates strongly with things people don't like about living a long healthy life and so we try to lose weight, but that is only a proxy.
"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
"generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other"
Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.
But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
People lose weight, temporarily, on all sorts of diets, restricted or not. It is the nature of specific diets that they tend to reduce appetite, and simply following a diet tends to reduce snacking - by virtue of selection bias, mostly (that is, people who are successfully following a diet are by definition people who aren't overeating).
Very traditional diets also tended to include lots of foods that are both highly processed and contain both sugars and fats, like cheese or sweet nut cakes. Paleo diets are a modern invention, and have little in common with the concept of what our ancestors ate. They often have deeply anachronistic ideas, like favoring raw foods, when the use of fire has been a core part of our ancestors consumption since way before Homo Sapiens existed.
I haven't found any paleo dieter that promotes eating solely or even primarily raw foods. That idea seems to be more common in carnivore and vegan communities.
Traditional diets however are still diets that came after the advent of agriculture.
People lose fat on calorie restricted diet. How will you get to it, either by counting them or by improving metabolism or by changing insulin levels, is a different thing.
Vegan or keto diet can both be calorie restricted, as much as any macronutrient mixture. However, it doesn't mean its sustainable. If you are hungry all the time, you can stay on the diet for some time, but not forever. Since insulin is the primary storage hormone, reducing it will make you less fat (just look at type 1 diabetics). We now know that carbs are the highest promoters of insulin, that fat has 0 influence, and protein some. We have drugs like metformin or GLP-1 that brute force some of it and they are working.
So, we know that sugar is mostly bad and that fat and protein are not. Ofc, some fats are bad for other reasons (by promoting inflamation) but that has nothing to do with obesity.
Thing about the keto diet is that "hungry all the time" simply... doesn't happen. In fact, bigger problem for keto dieters tends to be being satiated all the time and consequently undereating.
"Hungry all the time" is actually vegan thing, but plants have so few calories and pass through so quickly that vegans end up being skinny despite eating literally all the time.
You mean leafs, not plants? Cereals, beans, fruits and some roots have plenty of calories but your true fatty friends are all sorts of seeds and nuts. You also can buy their fat extract: oil.
It is definitely not protein. I tried carnivore diet for a while (had massive issues tolerating carbs lol), and the higher my protein intake was, more hungry I felt. Reducing protein and increasing fat also increased satiety.
Turns out, it is fats that produce satiety signals, and the effect seems to be by far the strongest with saturated fats, weaker with monounsaturated fats, while polyunsaturated fats actually induce hunger as strongly or even more strongly than carbohydrates do. The idea that "protein induces satiety" is a side effect of the fact that most (though not all) protein foods tend to be quite fatty.
The big question with such foods is are they worse for you just in and of themselves, or do they tend to promote obesity through inducing people to eat more? For the most part, research seems to suggest that as far as weight gain is concerned, calorie is a calorie (whether from fat, carbs, or protein), but some foods seem to induce people to eat more in general, compared to others. (highly processed and high-sugar food seeming to be some of the worst in this regard, but it's not clear exactly what it is about highly processed food that promotes this).
From what I have gathered (through research and by using myself as a guinea pig), there are two things about highly processed food that promote overeating:
1) high carbohydrate content
2) lack of nutrients
High carbohydrate content causes sugar spikes, which leads to insulin spikes, and insulin spikes both a) cause hunger and b) promote storage of energy in the form of body fat:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3894001/
Second issue is as I said lack of nutrients. Your body needs nutrients, and will force you to eat until nutritional requirements had been satisfied. Since processed foods have very few nutrients, your organism compensates by increasing dietary intake... which means increasing caloric intake.
I'm skeptical that paleo diet would be healthy for long term. There are studies where they find atherosclerosis in pre-industrial hunter-gatherer remains. It's called HORUS study.
From what I've managed to find in the newest research, it apppears that diet does not appear to have any impact on atherosclerosis itself. But, as they say, more data needed.
This. The amount of faith in nutrition "science" indicates severe science illiteracy in the public.
In general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is wrong in quality and quantity; you can't track enough people for the amount of time where supposed effects would manifest), there is almost zero control over what people eat (diets and available foods even considerably over a decade for whole countries, never mind within individuals), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid category, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree, and each again with different kinds in each category).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects, or the rare results of natural experiments / famines), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
Maybe it'll become actual science one day, but that won't be for decades.
Oh yeah, that was another question I had. So was this the only time the sugar industry influenced things? Was there an investigation? Either there was no investigation (why) or it didn't find anything else (?)
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
… it's $68,404 in today's dollars, according to BLS's inflation calc.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
This is one of those where you need to be able to discern nuances in your brain as multiple things are happening.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
> Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
Because vaccines aren't all that profitable compared to other pharmaceuticals but produce disproportionate public good.
The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors.
Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors.
This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research.
This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the last one.
> There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is inverted.
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition.
That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
The food pyramid went away over twenty years ago. It was discontinued in 2005, and the current guidelines are at https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/myplate which launched in 2011.
Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.
Yes, but I have distinct memories of these nutrition facts being taught to us in school for years, and our teachers asking us to report back how well we conformed to this supposed ideal diet as homework prior to any possible expectation that we children could be informed consumers.
Then I would think the meat, dairy, and egg industry didn't get their money's worth. The My Plate guidelines have protein as less than 25% of the plate, and nothing says it has to be animal based.
Dairy is completely unnecessary, for one. Its prominence on the plate makes everything else immediately suspect. There are probably some axes along which a glass of milk or cup of (unsweetened) yogurt is one reasonable option but that's not what is being promoted here.
I see it as more of a limit than a requirement. After all, you can technically satisfy your dietary needs with vegetables and eliminate fruits. But we aren't talking about technicalities and edge cases, rather what a balanced diet might consist of. For many people that does include dairy and fruits, even if neither are completely necessary.
I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here, which has partly been formed by the dairy lobby over the course of every living American’s lifetime. While it is true that we are not the only culture that drinks cow’s milk, it is predominantly a Northern European and later American phenomenon, and the number of people who are intolerant to dairy on some level is very high. I’m not saying a balanced diet cannot consist of dairy, but implying it should, as the plate diagram does, is highly misleading and outright paid for.
"I’m not saying a balanced diet cannot consist of dairy, but implying it should, as the plate diagram does, is highly misleading and outright paid for."
And to exclude it would imply that it cannot be part of a balanced diet. That would be misleading based on the predominate culture.
"I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here,"
I would suggest that you are not aware of the cultural background. The US was colonized by Europeans. Many cultures who immigrated also used milk, cheese, or other dairy products. It makes sense that the guidelines be based on the cultural background of the foods eaten in that country.
Also many Asian countries have nutrition guidelines that include dairy products, not to mention historical cultural foods that do include dairy.
I wouldn’t reduce food to some stupid equational graphic. Instead I would work to try to regain trust by cracking the whip on these companies for once, whether it’s their prices, the quality of their products, their advertising, or all of the above. Our diets deserve more respect and that’s the reason RFK has an audience. He’s speaking to people who believe that. There can be better leaders than him, but at least he’s doing something!
The food pyramid also seemed like pretty reasonable dietary advice until it wasn't. The skepticism expressed by other posters about where the guidelines originated from is well founded.
> Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.
The RFK jr version of the food pyramid now moves meat and dairy to the biggest section of the pyramid
Even the myplate doesn't seem right. There's probably too much fruit and too much dairy. There isn't any indication of legumes. Vegetables is too vague. There is no indication of fats, which are part of everything else.
But prior to that it was pushed very hard in elementary schools. I remember performing in a school play that was all about the food pyramid and nutrition, in lockstep with the government propaganda at the time.
Cellulose is one of the main constituant of plants and as a fiber, great for your gut:
> In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.
I consider the traditional food pyramid, with grain at the base, to make a lot of economic sense.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
> a significant amount of bookkeeping [...] for the general population
True, but not really more or less than a diet including animal products: in both cases they'll be good by varying the sources of macronutrients. In fact most long-term, healthy vegans don't bother bookkeeping what they eat. Some athletes and weight-loss seeker does but it's not particular to plant-based diet.
Vegan bookeeping is a common fallacy. A while ago I had an odd conversation with a doctor that went like that:
- It's complicated, you'll need to count everything !
- Is it different with animal products ?
- Oh yes no count I advise 1-2 serve of red meat every 2 weeks, 2-4 serve of fish per week, 1 serve of seafood once in a while 2 serves of chicken per week, adjusted if you workout. Also 2 diary product per day but avoid salty cheeses too often or in large quantity.
- I count 1 pill of b12 per day.
Nit: Children haven't been taught the food pyramid in something like a couple of decades I think. Current model is something like the DailyPlate visual - a plate filled proportionally with various things.
Definitely agree with the concern here, but this is not a problem unique to the food pyramid.
Children will be taught all kinds of propaganda if they attend a public school.
It's part of the cost, just not the part that is taken from tax dollars.
I've seen this over and over - adults assuming that what happens in schools today is the same their childhood experience in the classroom, frozen in time.
Parents of school-age children ranting and raving about how the school needs to stop doing X, when it hasn't been that way forever; and they cannot hear it, cannot absorb it, cannot stop talking about it. Something something childhood trauma.
Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
Food pyramid was taught when I was in school, but that was before 2011 (as mentioned by another commenter) my own children are in school now and their school lunches align with more modern ideas (veggies and proteins). Certainly could still be improved but I recognize the cost, scale, delivery constraints, plus allergy considerations makes this non-trivial.
When people say that SNAP (food stamps) should "only be able to buy healthy foods", they have to be reminded what the government considers to be healthy and just importantly, what the government considers to be unhealthy. Since SNAP is a government program, it almost certainly would use government guidelines on what is healthy.
I often hear that argument raised in response to the idea of SNAP covering things like sugary drinks and foods. I'm not sure how SNAP could follow guidelines and also pay for sugary drinks or candy (if those claims are accurate).
I think the real problem is that a food pyramid is an oversimplification.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
And most likely we will move too far in that direction in the near future. Too many people have their identity, religion, reputation, or paycheck invested in something about how they eat and so are unwilling to take an objective look at things. Instead they find studies that seem to fit their narrative and amplify them. They often will setup their experiments and data to get the results they want. And then we get into the reproducibility problem that science publications often have.
Eating nothing but processed foods, sugar, and heavily processed grains? That sounds like the opposite of what Kennedy recommends, which is a recipe for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
Red meat (a known carcinogen) at the top is gold. All that saturated fat the energy will come from (not from protein or veggies) will probably cause heart problems and plaque formation in arteries, not to mention insulin resistance just from increased FFAs in blood.
Vegetarians and vegans have lower T2D incidence on average FWIW.
> Vegetarians and vegans have lower T2D incidence on average FWIW.
Anecdotally, my dad tried vegetarianism for quite a while to address his T2D, but it had no effect. My mom cut out sugar and processed carbohydrates and her T2D was gone in ~3 months or so.
Following any diet is probably better than nothing at all, which could explain the lower incidence of T2D in that group vs the general public. I’d be more curious about the rates in vegetarians/vegans vs people who eat paleo or even carnivore.
Treating T2D and preventing T2D are completely different things from a dietary perspective. Same way you wouldn't give chemotherapy to a healthy person to prevent cancer
There are studies that support it. Here is a meta analysis of low carb diets on T2D, the majority show it works, though as always, there is going to be some individual variability.
Also, red meat isn't a known carcinogen. Processed meat is. And plaque formation in arteries is a consequence of inflammation... which is caused by sugar, a.k.a. carbohydrates. Insulin resistance is also a consequence of increased carbohydrate consumption.
But as I said, it is a combination of fats and carbs that is the worst killed. Eliminating either one of those from the diet leads to an automatic improvement.
The most common argument coming from people like you is X is bad because a lack of evidence, and then you present Y as an absolute truth with zero evidence. This time you've linked two garbage websites, both controlled by special interests. You've also fallen into the common trope of discrediting someone's entire view because of another view (so-called "quackery"). Your opinion is relatively consistent with the reddit/HN zeitgeist. That is to say, you are wrong.
Since you present no actual evidence. I won't either. Instead I'll tell you what is coming out as the truth:
1. Carbohydrates and especially sugars contribute more to various disease processes, including CVD, hyperlipidemia, etc than fat or meat consumption. A trivial google search, which you are clearly capable of doing, would show you that.
2. Eggs are loaded with cholesterol and saturated fat. Egg guidelines have been moved almost as often as salt and sugar. Most doctors will not stop you from eating 2-3 eggs a day because the benefits far outweigh the risks.
3. A balanced diet is better than one that isn't. But if you have no choice meat and fat have the highest level of satiation-to-energy of any kind of food.
4. High levels of exercise in combination with a diet higher in foods that have high levels of nutrition (meat, eggs, butter, and green leafy vegetables) will produce less negative health effects than following the government's health guidelines on either exercise or nutrition.
5. The existence of cultures that subsist entirely on meat and fat invalidates your argument. The eskimos, in particular, have comparable life spans and yet hyperlipidemia is extremely common among them. CVD is not. One factor could be the energy consumption due to exercise and extreme cold. The fact obesity, heart disease, cancer, etc risks all rose with the proliferation of highly processed carbohydrate and the "fat-free" trend is further evidence that something is wrong.
6. It is hard to believe anything the government says on nutrition is valid. Back when people watched the news we heard coffee is bad/coffee is good, salt is bad/salt is good, fat is bad/fat is good, meat is bad/meat is good. You should ask yourself seriously if you're getting your information from valid sources or if you just believe whatever the youtube you watch says.
It is possible to overdo nearly anything. Saturated fat guidelines, along with cholesterol guidelines, are likely too low even for conservative values. That being said, the amount of processed carbohydrate you should eat daily should approach 0 and you should consider it to be more of a snack if you eat it at all.
As for him being a quack, that’s earned through his refusal to follow scientific guidance, and sacking the guidance available. You’re presumably aware of his
views on fluoride and vaccines.
meme, noun. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another -- Wordnik
What annoys me the most is that sat fat is a huge way that sugary products are made more palatable to people. People love butter. It is every chef's 2nd favorite tool, just after salt.
Ever spread lard on toast? Do you prefer croissants made with lard? Is everyone's favourite dish these days lard chicken (I mean the Indian dish, not the Soul Food dish, which is of course popular in some locales).
Nope. Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous. Nothing to do with Big Cow or any special interest lobby local to certain valleys in the USA. Except maybe Big Bacon Drippings, because if there's one thing better for a grill cheese than butter it's bacon grease (thick-sliced sourdough bread, sharp Cheddar cheese, a shmear of chili crisp)
Now, suet has been demonized to the point that nobody makes suet pudding any more. A shame, really.
Butter is favored because most people had it in their youth. Some regions loves Nato and Chicken feet, others cheese and oysters. What's the most delicious? It depends of your own history.
I spread olive oil on my toast and prefer the croissants made with that as well. My favorite dish is fried tempeh.
Butter is NOT favored because most people had it in their youth, but because of its extremely distinct flavour.
"Unctuous" is certainly not specific enough, the reason butter (and ghee) is so delicious is its butteriness, i.e. it has a highly distinct taste. All properly rendered animal fats have highly distinct tastes and serve different purposes. Schmaltz tastes slightly of chicken, duck fat of duck, lard of pork, and tallow of beef.
But butter does NOT distinctly taste of beef, rather, it is reminiscent of slightly-aged milk (or, in the case of ghee, it may even strongly smell like certain kinds of aged cheese). There is, also, in butter, significant absorbed water content, and, to my palate, even a very subtle acidity that is not quite present in other rendered animal fats that give it a sort of brightness that make it work in things like butter-creams and other delicate or mild flavours (e.g. popcorn).
It is IMO this specifically "non-meaty" unctuousness that is the real draw of butter. Not some childhood nostalgia.
Wouldn't the preferred fat of a culture be spread between countries as they interacted then? Instead it has been fairly one directional with butter being adopted globally but other fats remaining niche (except Olive oil). Is that because of imperialism or is it because it is the best tasting one?
Today, I am one of the Ten Thousand [1] that learned you can make croissants with olive oil. Thank you for that! I've always assumed the laminated dough required solid fats, but apparently any layering of fat and flour can make flaky goodness. I am guessing that liquid fats are probably harder to work with, and croissants are already tricky enough to get right: but I must try.
Yes, lamination can be done with almost any fat, but the more you laminate (more layers / folds), the more that liquid fats sort of absorb into the dough, and stop having the desired separating effect. So while oil layering works well for e.g. paratha-style roti, scallion pancakes, and things that only really get one or two "layers" or "folds", oil is just fine. But when you get to something like a croissant, or even just a rough puff pastry (e.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/old-fashioned-flaky-pie-dough-re...), liquid fats are usually a complete non-starter.
You might be able to achieve something if you can somehow freeze your olive oil and chill your dough, and work very quickly during lamination, but you should, even with a lot of work and tweaking, still expect to get a noticeably inferior product for something like croissants.
Depending on how picky you are/not, you might still be personally happy with the texture and taste, but don't expect to get even remotely close to an actual good butter croissant, by more objective standards. Here in Canada we had a minor problem with the butter texture due to what we feed our cows here ("buttergate"), and this was preventing professional bakers from achieving quality croissants with just the Canadian butter. This should make you highly skeptical that you can get anything good with something as different as olive oil.
Still, I do love the idea of an olive oil croissant, it would be delicious.
Okay, so as expected liquid fats are much harder to work with and lead to an inferior flake. But, I assumed it was nigh impossible to do. If I can get 20% of the way there with olive oil I would be at least willing to try.
You can definitely get to 20% without much trouble, maybe even 30-50%, if you do some freezing tricks. Though what such percentages mean is highly subjective.
I am thinking if an ideal butter croissant has some flaky fluffiness (perhaps if we define it as "trapped volume" between flakes), and we define this ideal flakiness to be 100%, then you can extremely easily get to 20% with just olive oil. Frankly I think you might even get close to 50% (defined in this way) provided you also start with a trustworthy recipe by mass and that aims for proper hydration (e.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/croissants-recipe-11863500) and work quickly with lots of chilling.
Just, subjectively, you might realize that 20-50%, defined this way, isn't much like a proper French croissant, and is more like a cheap doughy supermarket chain croissant—which I do still frankly enjoy sometimes anyway!
As a kid I had both lard and butter on bread. Bras with lard and onions is amazing. But also that’s roughly the only combination of that works. Butter is way more versatile.
* Select a subset of diets that might fit your lifestyle.
* Make a list of categories you consume: refined sugars, all kinds of fats, gluten, dairy.
* Look for published papers on diets and categories.
I did a few dramatic changes throughout my life based on researches I did, not the hype. The first one was refined sugars for me and my kids - they didn't have a single cavity in baby and now permanent teeth. Pediatric dentist actually it's impressive, but little sugar here and there wouldn't harm with proper hygiene. One thing I learned about medical doctors is that they are not scientists, and unless they follow a protocol to diagnose and treat you, their opinion is often B.S. For adult, removing refined sugars reduced body fat percentage over time, but what's most important - lipid panel came to normal in about a year.
I have IBS, and what I did was literally that I kept a list of foods and symptoms they cause me.
Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
To add another data point: I love sweet things and eat a lot of desserts and sugar. I'm in my late 30s, and I've never had a cavity or weight issues. My BMI is around 21.
I'm not recommending sugar; my point is that anecdotes mean very little for this type of general diet advice.
It's fairly basic nutrition education that cutting out or reducing refined sugar intake will reduce cavities and reduce body fat. It's all about the amount you consume them in amongst the rest of your diet.
It's not new evidence, science or research that says you should reduce your refined sugar intake.
I don't see anything extreme, but the primacy of proteins (and especially meat-based protein) and dairy seem suspicious considering the broader rhetoric coming out.
I wonder if a US economy would be able to function if people at scale ate more healthily and sustainably. That would mean less of most things and more of vegetables, legumes, greens, all that unsexy stuff that is much less labour and energy intensive.
The second order effects of not having to grow food for our food, and grow food for ourselves in the first place instead are probably too negative.
> Protein serving goals: 1.2–1.6 grams of
protein per kilogram of body weight per
day, adjusting as needed based on your
individual caloric requirements.
it's crazy the us gov put this out and is still using kilograms for this formula
anyway, i don't find anything here that stands out or is obviously against the consensus, other than recommending tallow as a cooking fat. i don't see any signs of seed oil extremism or sat fat trutherism otherwise. there's even this line about limiting sat fat:
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal.
More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
"The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke." PMID 32562735 - Jun 2020, Journal of the American College of Cardiology
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
So that ends up being roughly 20 grams of saturated fat. I still consider that quite high, given that there is a strong correlation between saturated fat consumption and CVD.
> there is a strong correlation between saturated fat consumption and CVD
Reference? Many of the old studies have been proven flawed and, no surprise, corrupt [1]. Recent studies seem to suggest that it's only linked for some people.
Disclaimer: I am nearly uneducated with this topic, but find it increasingly hard to trust anything nutrition related, where big money is involved.
While I don't have studies on hand, I recommend watching `Viva Longevity!` on YouTube. He makes a case for the Ancel Keys studies, and why saturated fat is bad and why fiber is good.
It's been nearly a year or two since I've looked into it, but basically there is a lot of money in marketing for the beef and dairy industries, and that includes lobbying and influencing the outcomes of scientific studies. It's worth scrutinising claims against the Ancel Keys studies soley based on the fact, in my opinion.
Fair enough! I was not aware of that. But she's far from the only one. There appears to be a wall of meta-analysis stating the same, but again, I'm naive and just googling.
The dumb marketing label lowers the credibility that I'll expect to find good science in it. It in no way defines what the actual scientific credibility should be though.
A good book that explains it all is The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes, which came out the same year as this article.
Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.
To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').
These evil people want us sick and hospitalized with chronic disease from eating this crap. Now that it's political, hopefully people will see it for the bullshit it really is.
As a child of the 1980s, I feel so cheated that we were told to eat "5 servings of grains a day" pointing to bread and pasta -- when so many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar in the sauce.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
Bread with sugar in it is problematic, but that doesn't mean all bread is bad. That would be like saying that boiled potatos are as unhealthy as french fries. Or rolled oats vs. sugary industrial cereals. Whole grains are actually really healthy.
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.
3-2-4-4 / day, I was told in California. Excess grains made sense in the old days when food was more expensive. Grains are cheap and easily stored. They powered progress through the 19th and 20th centuries, and only became problematic for the majority when physical labor became less common, simultaneously with the low-fat craze.
I don't feel so violently on one side of this or another, but I agree with the spirit of your comment as a child of the 80s.
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
I wonder if this is because it has less to do with fat and carbs and more to do with processed foods.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
Cochrane systematic reviews should make you seriously question whether the Mediterranean diet really is much good at all - hard data is inconclusive and low quality [1].
In general we really even barely have enough nutritional knowledge to say if the term 'good fats' even makes much scientific sense, but broad and vague things like "Mediterranean diet" are just total nonsense, from the standpoint of serious nutrition science.
That seems to be searching for RCT's, which, I'm not surprised would struggle to replicate. Most of these had a duration of less than 5 years, while dietary related health outcomes are the result of decades of following a pattern. It's possibly also unethical, in some cases (i.e. the existence of effective LDL lowering medication would likely complicate things).
Many people seem to disregard epidemiology, especially when it comes to nutrition (I think because it tends to support unpopular positions). But epidemiology has performed some excellent feats in the name of public health: cholera, smoking, pfao.
It is unfortunate that the large time-lines on these things make more rigor difficult, but I wouldn't throw out the epidemiology.
Epidemiology should generally be disregarded when it comes to nutrition.
There are exceptions when there are rare natural experiments (e.g. I forget the country, but the European one where some issue caused all flour for the country to be only whole-wheat, which led to clear nutrient deficiencies due to the phytic acid there) but in general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is not just quantitatively but qualitatively wrong, and you can't track enough people nearly long enough), there is virtually no control whatsoever (diets and available foods shift considerably over just decades), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid taxon, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
But even setting that aside, you can't define or study "Mediterranean diet" rigorously even in RCTs, so I don't see how you can think you are going to get much of anything here from epidemiological work that is going to lead to anything practically actionable.
Notably, the epidemiological study people like to dump on the most, largely did use natural experiments (i.e. they chose regions, that, at the time, had very traditional diets, without the convenience of supermarkets to mess it all up). They also didn't rely solely on food surveys, but actually measured the meals.
But all that aside, I don't actually follow a Mediterranean diet, and agree that one has to be careful here, because it is not well defined (or, it might be in some circles, but that differs from what the general population might expect).
The only reason I mentioned it was in response to
> The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat.
Where I was pointing out that the fats in the Mediterranean diet (by pretty much every measure of what it means to be a Mediterranean diet), are not saturated, and it is usually saturated fats that are considered "bad".
That is, all I was trying to do was clear up the (common!) confusion about fats (they are not all the same).
Fair, the term may have been well-defined and measured in the original study, or in some specific circles. I was definitely thinking of the meaningless general thing "Mediterranean diet" has metastasized into today.
I also think it is better, rhetorically, to not draw support for the badness of saturated fats / differences of different fats by referencing the Mediterranean diet, since this rather looks like drawing upon narrow / weak science to support something that is in fact much more broadly supported by a larger variety of more careful work.
But yes, it is very important that people recognize there are huge differences here!
There are so many differences in lifestyle between the regions that they studied and other places that it is absurd to attribute the outcomes confidently to the diet. Especially when stress is a well known CVD risk in itself.
This sounds like they didn't think about it at all. Of course they did, and sure, their techniques were not as sophisticated as today. But there have been plenty of follow-up studies that have controlled more rigorously for those things, and it turns out they were probably right?
Also, the 7 countries study didn't just compare the regions, they also did intra-regional comparisons. Not that I think this particular study is what you should base all your evidence on, but, most others back it up.
The people who run these studies actually know what they are doing. They know the limitations of their methods, and, they have thought about confounding variables. This _always_ comes up in internet debate, like, "ahh, but there are confounding variables so the study must be trash!". It's literally their job to take those confounding variables into account. They don't just grab random people of the street to run these things. And I assure you, they know about the details.
No, they are not. Dietary cholesterol has little to zero impact on blood cholesterol, and saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful either, when accounting for other influences.
> Dietary cholesterol has little to zero impact on blood cholesterol
The "well, actually" point on this is that dietary saturated fat drives blood cholesterol levels more strongly than dietary cholesterol. But it is not true that dietary cholesterol has "zero impact," and it is not true that "saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful." High-cholesterol foods are typically high in saturated fat, so these things are kind of intertwined.
Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
Carbohydrates do cause insulin resistance and diabetes. India has average BMI of 21,9, yet has very high incidence of diabetes - largely thanks to its carbohydrate-based diet.
There are many people with type 2 diabetes that are not overweight; and also many people with overweight and even obesity who do not develop type 2 diabetes. The estimate is that around 537 million people have diabetes worldwide, while overweight and obesity is estimated to affect 1.1 billion people.
If I were to design a warning label I would take inspiration from the Australian tobacco warning labels, quite gruesome medical imagery of rotted teeth. Restricting the form of advertisement would be a start, like USA tobacco regulations.
Not sure if this has been posted (I see stephenwoo has mentioned him further down), but it's a break-down of how sugary foods damage the body, particularly fructose.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
That's addiction. You'll need time to get out of it.
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
I did keto for a few months a long time ago (2010/2011). This was early in my career and long coding and debug sessions were a normal part of my day-to-day.
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
Personal experience. Then I found many well known programmers shared the same experience online. It feels deliberate work without sugar. ie. if coding = work + fun. without sugar its just coding = work. It does not get any better after 3 days or so too.
It might feel good but spiking your blood sugar isn't healthy for you, and the crashes afterwards will get worse over the years. Improving metabolic health might be a better long term solution; have you explored how endurance or high intensity exercise affects your focus?
Been coding while fasting on keto and it's absolutely amazing. Fasting is hard socially, being ketogenic puts a bit more stress on my kidneys, but for me (adhd) it's amazing.
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
Yes it can and it does that when there is an absence of available glycogen provided through carbohydrates, it is not to replace but to support in addition to appropriate sugar intake. It is a less efficient source of glucose, does not provide a large enough amount for exercise and also uses amino acids from muscle to help. Do this long enough and you end up in ketosis which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Why neglect one aspect of our bodies digestive energy systems for just gluconeogenesis. Wouldn't you be better off eating a balanced meal of complex carbohydrates and unsaturated fats. Our bodies have multiple pathways to producing energy, focusing on using only one is silly and not the right approach because it wasn't designed to be that way.
Just because our bodies can survive doing a particular thing in the absence of another, doesn't mean that thing we're absent of isn't required.
Its optimal to solve all the constraints or requirements of needs of the body. But we don't fully understand the requirements as a whole and conflicting information from expertsh. So the rational thing is to rely on the historical data and make judgements on the probability.
If you're addicted to cocaine, then cocaine is really important for focus. Same for sugar. If sugar is really important for focus for you, then you're likely heading for diabetes type 2.
This isn't really a correct narrative. Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with CVD. Sugar is also correlated with poor metabolic health which is also correlated with CVD. Both are bad.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
The so-called "Mediterranean diet" is a myth, and one of many myths that even serious "nutrition scientists" believe and perpetuate. Actual people in the Mediterranean have way different diets, and ones that include significant quantities of things like pork, lamb, fatty fish, very sugary confections, processed meats like sausages or jamon, etc.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
Mediterranean diet is basically a lie, though. If you look at the healthiest Mediterranean populations, they eat a lot of saturated fat.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
I've been to the Mediterranean several times. They eat a ton of (delicious) super oily food, sausages, meats, eggs, fish (often fried or deep fried), salty cheeses, greasy stuff, tons of white bread, lots of wine. Fat chance to find someone eating avocados, kale, or quinoa, and proteins are not at all minimized.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
Countries in the mediterranean have been developing the same bad habits as elsewhere. People in the Mediterranean need to go back to eating a Mediterranean diet.
Sugar got into all the meal we have, and because it is so addictive, we went for it. Fatty meals are more healthy, especially for me, but will get you sick in no time, unless you eat healthy fats (olive oil, olives especially). The trans fats are carcinogenic
A) Eating a pound/kg of fat
B) Eating a pound/kg of refined sugar
Correct answer: B
Sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
At the same weight, fat contains way more calories than sugar, so the difference in difficulty of digestion is irrelevant at this level. It's true that if you were to consume 1000 Cal worth of sugar vs 1000 Cal worth of fat, you'd get slightly less fat from the fat - but this should be seen simply as one of many limitations on the "calories in" measurement. The same kinds of differences likely exist between different sugars, different fats, different proteins - and may well be affected by other aspects of how the food containing these nutrients is consumed; and it almost certainly varies a lot between people or even for the same person based on various factors such as age, activity level, time of day, etc.
> The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
And the muscles. You can’t fight or flight if you have to ask the liver to deliver glycogen. That’s how anaerobic exercise works. You have the fuel but not enough oxygen to burn it so you burn it fuel rich and oxidizer poor.
The grandparent means something a bit different. Muscles can use glucose without _oxygen_ to get short bursts of energy quickly by rearranging glucose molecules (indirectly) into lactic acid.
CVD requires a bunch of events to happen in sequence, I always felt like it was a combination of risk factors + luck that make a heart attack or aneurysm happen.
1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins
2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls
3. LDL gets oxidized
4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques
5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.
Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.
It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.
Consuming cholesterol doesn't normally change the level of cholesterol in your bloodstream - it simply leads to your body producing less cholesterol. Unless you're consuming gigantic amounts, or have some problems with your cholesterol regulation, dietary cholesterol is completely safe. It's only if your blood work shows elevated cholesterol levels that you need to start paying attention to cholesterol intake. This is in fact very similar to what happens to blood sugar levels, in fact.
all simple carbs are the devil, but we can't possibly feed billions of people actually healthy food - organic vegetables, nuts, and animal products, so come drink your corn syrup.
The sugar industry (topic of this article) can only be blamed for sugar, though -- not all high-GI foods.
And you can replace "sugar" in what I said earlier with "high-GI foods" and it doesn't change a thing. Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
>Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
how is it not dietary if consuming most carbs spikes your blood sugar for hours, which, with three meals + snacks + starbucks slurry, means elevated blood sugar 20+ hours a day?
Sugar causes inflammation, and inflammation damages arteries. It is this damage that then leads to accumulation of fatty deposits, as damaged arteries basically lose the protective layer (think of equivalent to a non-stick coating). But that doesn't mean dietary fat is what actually caused the plaque.
I feel like the same thing is happening now… processed foods have less sodium and I feel are more sugary. I don’t live a sedentary lifestyle…I need salt for hydration and muscle contraction. I find the new nutrition guidelines for sodium lacking.
The 2016 JAMA paper illustrates how funding sources can shape research focus, reinforcing the value of transparency and multiple lines of evidence in nutrition research.
I mean, anecdotal but I suffered metabolic syndrome. Cut out all carbs, increased my fat intake. This led to a loss of 50 pounds, my blood fat and blood cholesterol dropped, liver enzymes in the blood dropped, insulin resistance reversed, blood pressure dropped, and according to my blood, everything is now normal.
This is on HNs homepage because it confirms what we want to believe about our favorite foods: saturated fat = bad is just a sugar industry psy-op!
But notice how "Sugar industry blames [saturated] fat for CVD" doesn't mean it's good for you. Their motive is to sell you sugar.
Just like finding evidence of the meat/dairy industry sowing FUD on saturated fat doesn't mean it's bad for you. Their motive is to sell you saturated fat.
We should instead look at our best converging contemporary evidence on how saturated fat impacts human heath outcomes, not wank off to blog posts like this.
Sorry to say but I see a lot of ill informed takes here on sugar, fats and their 'correlation' with CVD.
To put it bluntly, jut eat maintenance calories with most of it coming from good protein sources and eat good amount of fibre. No, dietary cholesterol isn't gonna kill you, nor is sugar but obviously that doesn't mean you eat tons of them.
And the most important is enough sleep and WORKOUTTTT. 240 min of cardio and resistant training combined. Is that a lot to do?
Why do you need to optimize each and every aspect of each nutrition? "Oh, I don't eat meat because it is correlated to heart disease, so I consume dairy. Oh wait it isnt exactly digestible so I consume vegetables. Oh wait, I will have to eat like KGs and Kgs of veggies to meet the nutrient requirement. Oh wait, that means I am eating tons of carbs". How about you stop brushing your ego and just keep it simple by having a sense of number of calories you want and then eat enough protein from natural sources.
Yeah, for sure if you have any beliefs which prevents you from eating something then by all means find alternatives and have processed food. Processed food is not necessarily bad. Whey protein is processed but it is very important for vegetarians. What grinds my gears is this push to find the ideal diet. Vegans hate carnivores. Carnivores make fun of vegans for eating veggies. Like bro, shut up.
A casual look at where people live the oldest, what they eat, and what's recommended tell you all you need to know about food recommendations then and now.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
I think avoiding industrially processed food is wise, but it eliminates 99% of restaurant food and 90% of prepared food in almost any setting, only exception being about half the stuff at a salad bar.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
It doesn't have to be a religion. I don't care when I eat out. The point is not to be absolutely consistant. It's just the guideline I use regarding what I eat.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
> The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
For me avoiding processed foods is not that hard, I only eat whole foods like vegetables and fruits (where I live there are no labels on these whole foods). I know that this is not doable for most of you, but it can be done if you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_diet
This is a complete myth. Human populations are not homogenous, gene pools that relied on agriculture for the last 10k years are completely different than hunter gatherer populations. You have been lied to
Which myth? I have genuine trouble understanding what you disagree with.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
Of course they do, if enforced. The number of eight year-olds working in factories is substantially lower than it used to be due to regulations. *in modern democracies
If you do regulate. We currently have full regulatory capture in most industries and regulators that are doing their jobs are either hamstrung or the laws are so far behind the industries that they can’t or won’t work.
The key to proper regulation is to keep money and influence from pooling at the top, making it difficult for any single person to buy enough influence.
As it is, we have a dozen monopolies that should be broken up that are making a small section of the population so rich they are essentially above laws.
But, proper regulation can exist if people want it, and more specifically in the case of the USA, legislators want it. Unfortunately, Dems actively prevent it, and republicans are ripping it down, so the rest of us are kinda fucked.
Regulations can work if bypassing the regulation in question does not open up a market that is large enough to keep paying off the regulators.
For example, if there is only one regulator for a country, the companies can pay millions to get it eased up for them, because they can make billions from it.
But if there one regulator for each state, they equation will change and it might not be profitable to pay millions to a regulator of the state, because they cannot make enough profit from selling in the state to justify it.
That is the only way to make it work. Rules don't work forever. Incentives do.
They’re out there. I find it more productive to search for and financially support such businesses, rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take.
For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.
Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
>many order of magnitude more people would like to just make more money when invest
Blame them (the consumers) then. This is like that silly Reddit/Twitter stat about 10% of companies creating 90% of global emissions… which the companies are doing in the process of making the shiny cell phones and laptops all the consumerists lambasting them are posting from, plus all the plastic crap they buy every day from Amazon.
The consumers are the ones demanding unchecked expansion of their consumption. As long as that demand exists, companies will find a way to fill it, whether they’re doing so in America or other countries. Privately held entities can’t allocate capital fast enough to keep up with the consumerists.
cant blame the consumers who are brainwashed by the ads that uses every weakness in human nature to create phantom needs, making up artificial demand for things..
Based on the history of the past 1-ish century, I trust Big Meat & Dairy to have less capability for and competence at evil than Big Sugar. Because otherwise we'd have been hearing far more "Fat is Fine, Carbs are Crap" messages.
Well, it's true that in the 17th century, sugar and rum production involved one of the most heinous forms of slavery ever to exist. What's not clear is that this necessarily has anything to do with the present; after all, slaves were emancipated a long time ago.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
CVD and links to saturated fats is a long, long established phenomenon and has a lot of science behind it. A single study or even studies should not invalidate or discount it. Before people misinterpret what this is saying.
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Those studies however generally put beef and sausages into the same "red meat" category. So yeah... that science is, from what I've seen, basically worthless.
Large percentage, yes. The issue is the "not large percentage" part. Sugar, additives, preservatives, colors... all of these are toxic. And when you mix up beef steak with sausage... you won't get realistic results.
That's like asking "what's the issue if somebody salts the soup with cyanide, most of the meal will still be soup". Yeah, but the cyanide will still kill you, even if it is the small percentage.
there are literally thousands of studies. there's no real scientific debate amongst people that know what they are talking about. Red meat, and any food high in saturated fats, are awful for your heart. full stop. that includes sausage, steak, ham, butter, etc.
the people eating "lean steaks" are fooling themselves. There's no such thing as "clean beef" it all has high amounts of bad fats. Are some worse than others? of course but let's not kid ourselves.
There is very little science in nutrition, despite the existence of thousands of studies. There are huge gaps in even the basics of nutrition understanding, and we are constantly discovering new confounding variables. Some dietary fibers were being counted as carbs as late as the 2000s. The huge impacts of the gut microbiome on digestion of food has barely been recognized in the last 10 years, and we still basically know nothing about it. Inter-personal variations in base metabolic rates and/or absorption of nutrients from food is gigantic, with basically no known reasons for it (some of the difference is tied to muscle mass, but even if you eliminate differences in muscle mass, there are still large differences that remain), and no inclusion in common models and dietary recommendations.
I'm not trying to say that red meat is good for you. I'm just saying we have no real idea, and you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot. Try things out, see if you can eat similarly to people you know who are in good health, and get blood work done regularly to see if you're ok. Probably avoid highly synthesized foods.
Says you? because that's not what cardiologists, nutritionists and doctors say. around the world. there's a ton of real, good science from many countries that show a very clear link between increased saturated fat intake, CVD and LDL-C levels. It's not really in question.
You are essentially hand waving away 80+ years of scientific studies and data because...you said so?
> you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot.
This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern.
In any other domain, I would agree with you 100%. But nutrition science really is that bad, in my experience and opinion. With some exceptions (e.g. the need for vitamins to avoid things like scurvy, or the relationship between salt intake and blood pressure), even long-standing nutrition beliefs and practices have been overturned (e.g. consumption of cholesterol, or the discovery of the role of dietary fiber), and some of the newer research is likely to overturn others (e.g. with the role and diversity of gut microbiomes, it's likely other nutrition advice will depend to some extent on your specific microbiome).
The reason for this is fairly simple to see: the methods of science that work so well in other areas of biology are completely impractical in nutrition because of
1. The difficulty of ascertaining and maintaining compliance with a specific diet for a long term study
2. The very long-term effect of some food choices
3. The unknown degree of inter-personal variance in food consumption
4. The expected low effect size of dietary recommendations
5. The huge variety of possible dietary effects
6. The huge amount of possible confounding factors in any population-level study
As you'd expect from this combination, the only effects we really have good science about are those that are relatively fast acting (e.g. salt intake increases BP in less than a day) or have very strong effect sizes (e.g. lack of vitamins or certain amino-acids produces severe diseases). For things like life-long effects, or even effects over multiple years, especially where the correlation is slight, you're left with very unclear science where the unknown possible confounding factors dominate any conclusion.
Edit to add: even today, there is a clear disconnect in nutrition science between people who advocate mostly for relatively simple guidelines and the avoidance of processed foods, usually recommending a preference for vegetables over animal-based products; and the older style of guidelines that you suggest, that say a grilled steak is much worse for you than, say, a stevia-sweetened granola bar you'd buy in a super market.
Dietary cholestrol hasn't really been overturned, but sure there is some nuance. Some people do respond badly to dietary cholestrol (like you said, individual advice is sometimes required), but dietary cholestrol is also not a linear response afaiu. That is, if you eat one egg a day, you may as well eat 4, but if you can completely eliminate dietary cholestrol it could make a difference. So, many guidelines don't bother with suggesting it, because it's too hard to eleminate it to the point of mattering for the average person.
All that to say, the science isn't wrong, but the practicalities influence the advice.
The guidelines haven't changed, but they should be. The association between cholesterol and CVD is specifically related to blood cholesterol levels. However, in healthy individuals, blood cholesterol levels are not strongly impacted by dietary cholesterol choices - since cholesterol is synthesized in the body, there is homeostasis, and higher cholesterol intake leads to lower rate of synthesis, maintaining the same blood levels.
However, some individuals suffer from a bad regulation of this homeostasis, and for them dietary cholesterol does lead to persistent high levels of blood cholesterol as well. So the guidelines should apply for them, but not for everyone else.
Nutrition science is not science in almost any of the ways a real science needs to be, and there is almost zero "real, good science" to be found in it. The reasons this statement is true (as well as the precise qualifications of the exceptions to this) are well laid out by tsimionescu in response to your post.
The measurement, control, confounds, and even basic concepts are atrocious here, this is possibly the only field as bad as or even worse than e.g. social psychology. And this is all ignoring the massive economic interests involved.
It is in fact only science illiteracy that would lead one to think nutrition science is a serious science. At the most absolute charitable, it is a protoscience like alchemy (which did have some replicable findings that eventually led to real chemistry, but which was still mostly nonsense at core).
Matter of the fact is that the entirety of belief that saturated fat "clogs the arteries" was based on the epidemiological studies which failed to adjust for other risk factors such as trans fat intake, intake of processed foods, and many more.
We should not throw away "80+ years of scientific studies and data" because... said "80+ years of scientific studies and data" do not exist. Not a single actual study had ever been made. The best we have are epidemiological studies, and these have massive issues.
"This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern."
It is not an insane take, you are just being a dumbass. Doctors do not have any training in nutrition. When I asked my doctor - doctors, actually, plural - for dietary advice, literally all of them told me "I don't have knowledge to advise you on that, figure it out on your own".
Science has basis in reality, yes. But doctors aren't scientists.
not sure where people have been for the last year but MAHA and rfk have been on the "fat is good train" and seem to completely ignore entire decades of science.
As a teen I was fooled for a short time, confused about fats, types, etc. But I was a feral child and as ignorant as any animal. It didn't take long to figure things out after I learned to read.
I expect more of government though, and while I see the vague rationale behind hamfisted soda regulations, I remain deeply irked by the Fat Tax that Denmark once imposed. I offer no benefit of doubt and view that thankfully now bygone usurpation of the family table as unforgivable and implemented in full awareness of its flaws.
If one chooses to blame this on corporate influence and ignorance, then either way it exemplifies how easily fundamental aspects of our personal lives can be controlled based on deception.
Ain't sure about anyone else, but I certainly wonder how many other similar delusions we're subject to under such influence and "research'. I know of more than a few.
For me it begs the question of how and why we've allowed such centralized frameworks to persevere. Independent groups do exist, but then there's SEO, mainstream-media and all the other factors that make them practically invisible. And with abandonment of the Internet in favor of corporate friendly LLMs, I expect it to get worse.
depends on how fat you already are - if you are, 100% of it converts. For anyone that is addicted to sugar they are pretty much a fat person. The sugar industry is blaming themselves.
That industry can lobby for and basically "purchase" scientific outcomes that affect health standards should be a defcon 1 red alert. People should be lose their careers over this, at the very least imo.
And the fact that people do not care is just as, if not more, concerning.
This is how you get MAHA, which I support bc of this, craziness included.
Yeah, I completely reject nutritional science. Even without bribes involved, there are just too many complexities for them to draw useful conclusions. Ignored the food pyramid too.
You should try the carnivore diet and completely eliminate Vitamin C intake to prove them scientists wrong! Scurvy is just a complex myth, after all. Just like rickets, or blindness from Vitamin A deficiency.
When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it.
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research.
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
I would caution that just because your body can make something doesn't mean it will have optimal performance when doing so. People in ketosis do have worse peak performance in sports than those that eat more carbs/sugar.
True, but also what performance are we optimizing? Do I want to be able to run faster, hit harder, lift more, etc..?
Or do I want to live longer?
They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but different actions could result in different outcomes for each.
> worse peak performance in sports
For nearly everyone, this isn't impactful to their life. Only their vanity
That has nothing to do with whether excesses of those nutrients cause cardiovascular disease, though. The general consensus is that the healthiest diet is one with 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat. For most people, it's necessary to restrict saturated fat to land in that range. We also need to distinguish between sugar and carbohydrates. Again, the general consensus is that intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates should be minimized, while 50-75% of total calories should come from sources of complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
Carbohydrates are sugars (from the first sentence on wikipedia): "A carbohydrate (/ˌkɑːrboʊˈhaɪdreɪt/) is a sugar (saccharide) or a sugar derivative." Saying you need "50-75% of your energy from [sugar]" illustrates why that is a somewhat odd statement. Yes, glucose is much better than fructose, but eating a ton of glucose will still lead to high insulin spikes and inflammatory diseases. Complex carbohydrates are better in that they take longer to digest, not because they're magically different. Vegetables are good for nutrients not because you need their carbs.
GP was talking specifically about calories, not other nutrients. My impression is when a vegetable provides significant calorie content it tends to be in the form of carbohydrates.
You have to get your calories (ie raw energy) from somewhere. If you limit saturated fat to 10% then what's left for the other 90% is (roughly speaking) unsaturated fat, simple sugars, carbohydrates (ie complex sugars), and protein. In terms of long term habits converting protein to calories is probably not a great choice for your health. If you decide to go for complex carbohydrates over various oils then vegetables that provide those are a good option.
People are on ketogenic diets for years and even decades with no adverse affects. There's nothing wrong with getting energy from other sources, your body can manage it fine.
Ketogenic diets are high fat. I suggested that a diet where the bulk of your calories comes from protein (not lipids, carbohydrates, or simple sugars) was probably not great for your health.
Your body can certainly "manage" on a high protein low fat low carb diet but I don't understand it to be good for you.
Funny you should say that after today's FDA announcement. (Not taking any side here just interested in how we determine what is a consensus these days)
It's hard, because when an issue becomes politicized everyone has their own preferred "consensus". I would say it should come from the scientific community, not government agencies. Sometimes government agencies agree with the scientific consensus, but not always.
My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
There is a third option: looking at the diets of your closest ancestors with the best longevity.
There may be a misconception that there is one single best diet for everyone, when in reality we people (over generations) evolve with our diets, and your best diet and my best diet may be completely different.
The problem with using science as a guide is that there are just too many variables and not enough time, data and money to isolate them all sufficiently.
However that is distinct from the idea that too much of something like refined sugar might be unhealthy for just about everyone. So science does have an important role to play, I just don't think it's advanced far enough to fully answer the question for everyone.
> everyone has their own preferred "consensus"
For some people choice of diet really does seem core to their identity. It’s literally all the OP ever posts about.
Looks like it's true that low-carb adapted athletes rely more on fat oxidation during exercise but performance suffers nonetheless because of increased oxygen demands that basically cannot be met.
Your entire argument here applies in the other direction as well. You do not need dietary saturated fats, and sugar has all sorts of uses biologically.
That is only partly true: you don't need dietary saturated fats, but you do need essential fats (omega-3 and omega-6), which are polyunsaturated. However, sugar does not have all sorts of uses biologically; it has only one: as one (but not the only one) source of energy.
It isn't just a source, it is also a storage mechanism, both in the liver and in muscle tissue.
> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
You're right that extrapolating from one flaw to claim wholesale debunking is a common logical fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-C....
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
I think the benefits of "low fat" may have been dulled by how literally people took that message, and what companies replaced the fat with.
Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right?
Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right?
In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle.
At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better.
Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. )
Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
Agreed, this is a big part of the problem. The average person doesn't have anything resembling a coherent mental model of nutrition, and vague conflicting nutritional advice only adds to the confusion. The average person doesn't even know what a carb is, much less understand the biochemistry of how their body processes one.
Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.
The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
I disagree. Demand is the big problem, not supply.
The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus.
Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public.
More here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
First time ever I get : "The uploader has not made this video available in your country"
But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.
I call this the "Everything in Moderation" fallacy. From what I've heard people who say it, they emphasize the everything part of it. In other words almost everything is bad for you so just eat a little bit of everything and you won't get too much of the bad stuff. It's maddening.
The way I understand it (and my understanding is certainly poor, so I welcome well-supported pushback on it), is that few, if any, components in the food that we in developed countries eat today are actively harmful in themselves (with the caveat outlined below)
The main issue is overconsumption leading to overweight and obesity. Food that’s high in refined sugars and/or saturated fats tend to contribute to this, because it’s palatable and calorie-dense
So in that sense, yes - I believe that as long as your diet is varied enough that you get sufficient intake of all, or at least most, of the essential nutrients, and you don’t eat too much (i.e. in moderation), the ratio of macronutrients doesn’t make a big difference to your health outcome
The crux is that moderation is hard when the food is jam-packed with calories, and it’s so delicious you just want to keep stuffing your face
By volume most of the food in modern western grocery stores is unnaturally sugary or otherwise calorie dense.
You have to restrict yourself to produce and a few scant other options to escape with balanced nutritional products.
They even advertise cereals as a "part of a healthy breakfast". Which is a lie under any circumstances, because it's never a healthy part if you eat it long term. (Yes it could keep you from starving to death in a famine, still not 'healthy'.) Imagine if they could only say "it will keep you from starving, and may significantly contribute to diabetes"
I don’t think “Everything in Moderation” means you won’t get too much of the bad stuff. The philosophy alludes to the fact that in the modern world, trying to have the ideal diet is exhausting and near impossible. Lack of choice, money, time, education, self control etc. all contribute to you intentionally or unintentionally eating stuff that’s going to do irreparable harm to you. You could be eating salads and somehow poisoning yourself with pesticides and high sugar/fat/sodium salad dressings. Which is why this philosophy focuses on, do everything in moderation and you’ll maybe avoid CVD and other diseases for longer. It is meant for people who cannot meet the idealistic standards of what you are supposed to do.
Is it really that exhausting though? I've been on a zero-carb diet for two months (other than thanksgiving or christmas), and it really hasn't been hard at all. If I eat at a restaurant there's some things I can't avoid (seed oils), but otherwise it's not too hard to look at a menu and see things I can eat. The only hard part is to be optimally healthy I need to cook for myself, but that's always been true.
In a lot of ways, it's actually been easier. Because my blood sugar isn't crashing every few hours, I can easily skip a meal and feel perfectly fine. Fasting is very easy for me now, which it wasn't at all on an unhealthy diet.
Yet you are unavoidably eating micro-plastics too, which have been linked to adverse CV events.
Also:
- If you are eating more fish (as opposed to eating meat), you are likely consuming more mercury.
- If you are eating more fresh veggies you are probably ingesting more pesticides.
- If you are easting dark chocolate for its health benefits, you are also ingesting cadmium and other heavy metals.
So all the above should be done in moderation. Even things that seem like unalloyed good can be dangerous. A burst of exercise beyond your conditioning can lead to a CV event. Too much water can be poisonous. Some people get constipation for too much veggies in their diet.
For example, instead to sticking to a narrow faddish supposedly healthy diet, you can enjoy a wide range of foods, which will make it more likely you are getting all the nutrients that will do you good (of course clearly unhealthy food should be avoided).
The body is more complex than we can ever know. There are some general principles for good health (including CV health) that should be followed, but to me it is clear that good health does not arise from a slavish devotion to very detailed set of rules.
Funnily I've heard that one reason why obesity is prevalent is that we have too many variations of food. Seems like our hunger controller suspends satiety when we eat a food too much, but when we eat few of lots of different foods, it's broken.
It'd be funny if lots of fad diets actually works because people are forced to eat a single type of food and that's entirely enough for it.
It could also explain why most of us can eat like pigs in all-you-can-eat buffets.
Your post sounds like "bad things can happen so why bother". Having a good diet isn't "slavish devotion", it's more like "don't eat something obviously terrible"
People who don’t make money, have to take care of childcare while working 2-3 jobs, probably aren’t able to cook themselves. Nor are the people who live in food deserts that only have limited options able to optimize around a specific diet that’s not restricted by availability.
I cook my own food and optimize around eating healthy. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I made less money or had a more demanding job or didn’t have great grocery stores in a 10 mile radius or had to spend time in childcare or any of the other completely valid reasons people have.
Besides, you yourself just described “do things in moderation” yourself: holidays, Christmas, restaurants etc. That’s really what the philosophy is.
What is moderation? The volume (or mass) of a single apple of alcohol is going to make you very drunk (most alcohol is mixed with water: an apple's worth of beer is very little, that much Everclear is a problem).
That is what I hate about the everything in moderation. We need to do better since some things should be in much larger amounts than others.
I think we all would agree that any amount of rat poison is a bad thing, thought perhaps this is too much of a strawman.
Even if you can’t change the inevitability of CVD, what you do will absolutely change WHEN you get it.
I've never seen this fallacy.
What I've seen is that the best and most well documented way to prevent CVD is the DASH diet paired with exercise and potentially statins.
If you are an unhealthy weight you are both eating too much and/or not exercising enough. High calorie foods can be fatty, sugary, or both.
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
The 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has.
US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified.
Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
Sure, that’s a reasonable take, but satiety research was also far less developed.
The general understanding at the time was basically a full stomach tells people they have eaten enough. We didn’t understand the multiple systems the body uses to adjust the hunger drive and how much a high carb low fat diet messes with them.
> I'm sorry, but this is simply nonsensical. Calories were EVERYTHING among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
Less vilified is on a relative scale, I was alive back then and there was plenty of nonsensical low calorie diets being promoted. However you also saw crap like the Fruitarian Diet where unlimited fruit meant people could actually gain weight on a diet that also gave them multiple nutritional deficiencies.
Low fat dieting is in part from that same mindset as fruitarian diet where it’s not the calories that are the issue but the types of food you were eating. Digging just a little deeper these ideas made more sense before global supply chains and highly processed foods showed up. Culture can be a lot slower to adapt than technology or economics, diet advice from your grandparents could be wildly out of date. Cutting X means something very different when you have 20 available foods vs 20,000.
> Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar.
That has been kind of a consequence of that though. Low-fat foods tend to taste pretty bland, so sugar is added instead to improve flavor.
The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.
Skim/lowfat milk just... takes the cream out.
The same rule changes tightened the rules on added sugar.
Taking the cream out is (by some diet theories) bad. The fat in whole milk slows down the absorption of lactose, leading to a slower rise in blood glucose compared to skim milk. Whole milk is more satiating as well, because of the fat.
If you are trying to have some reasonable balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet, pushing kids from whole to skim milk is going to move the diet towards consuming more sugar/carbs, even if you have a seperate rule trying to tighten sugar consumption.
None of that makes "remove the fats and replace them with sugar" in the post upthread accurate.
When you take a high satiety, high fat item, and replace it with a non-fat, low satiety item, you are in effect replacing fat with sugar, because you will eat/drink more of it to get same number of calories, and same amount of fullness.
Milk is not high satiety, come on now.
Drink a glass of whole milk, then drink a cup of skim milk and tell me there is no difference. Try the same with full fat yogurt and non-fat yogurt. Big difference in satiety, but more importantly blood sugar response. Roughly the same amount of fat in a glass of whole milk as 1/4 pound burger.
I don't think anyone ( at least around me ) is drinking milk based drink twice as much just because they feel like they get less energy per drink from skimmed milk.
You are making an argument that people do so, do you have any evidence for this ?
>Drink a glass of whole milk, then drink a cup of skim milk and tell me there is no difference
Ok, there's no different.
Beyond that, Minor differents in glycemic load are irrelevant if you're consuming milk with a meal, like the kids in school are doing.
>Big difference in satiety, but more importantly blood sugar response.
There is a negligible difference in glycemic index / glycemic load between the variations of M.F. milk products. Some analysis has skim milk as having a lower GI.
Unflavoured Milk is not relevant to the GI conversation.
Skim milk is not "low fat". It is fat free. In the US milk labeled as low fat is 1% or 2% milk fat (usually 2%). Whole milk is around 4%. Skim milk rounds to 0%.
2% milk is a pretty good balance.
> Skim milk is not "low fat"
Read the slash as “or”, not “also known as”.
For the milk you don't add sugar directly, but you end up adding more carbs to the rest of the meal when you take out nothing but fat from the milk.
Whole milk is 4% milkfat, to skim's 0%. We're not talking much here.
In my country the lowest fat milk has added lactose.
It did twenty years ago, when I noticed, I have not bought it since
Is it added deliberately or just concentrated as a side-effect? Say fat comprised, let me guess, 5% of whole milk volume. If you take away this 5% v/v component, now everything else in one liter of skim milk is 5% concentrated by comparison, unless they add water.
>which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
This is not accurate.
No they didn't "replace" the fats with sugar. There is a chocolate milk option, just as there was before, but all options need to be 1% or low M.F., which nutrition and medical science overwhelmingly supports.
Is chocolate milk not ideal? Of course. We all know that. They shouldn't serve it either.
They will however recommend sugar, just by calling it something else.
See "carbohydrates", "complex carbohydrates", "integral grain" and so on.
Quite frankly, plain sugar from fruit is less dangerous than the complex carbs from grains. But fructose is still dangerous, just less so.
Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
>High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.
Such "science" should be illegal.
If propaganda was illegal, who would decide what was propaganda and what was simply argumentation made from positions of relative ignorance?
The courts could easily decide whether a message has been paid for or not.
All messages are paid for by someone.
the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal.
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
It's not legal, but intentional misconduct can be tough to prove.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-op...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben
> in every other industry that i can imagine
Our own industry (tech) is rife with unpunished fraud.
> intentional misconduct can be tough to prove
It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated. How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding? How many have been criminally investigated?
> How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding?
But being wrong isn't a crime. Intentional fraud is.
> It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated.
And it's hard to investigate without some reasonably solid evidence of a crime.
> it's hard to investigate without some reasonably solid evidence of a crime
I’d say the Ariely affair is reasonably suspicious.
I don't disagree, but it appears Duke did investigate in that case, and was unable to prove intentional wrongdoing.
I am glad it takes more than mere suspicion for the government to go search my private writings and possessions.
my own institution launched an internal investigation into a professor who i know for a fact committed fraud and was "unable to prove intentional wrongdoing". academic institutions have taken the "this never happens because we are morally pure" approach which we all know is a load of baloney, they are perversely incentivized to never admit fraud.
the witness and reportee who i am friends with was directly instructed by this professor to falsify data in a more positive light in order to impress grant funders. multiple people were in attendance in this meeting but even that was not enough to see any disciplinary action.
duke also has a notorious reputation for being a fraud mill.
> it appears Duke did investigate in that case, and was unable to prove intentional wrongdoing
They also kept the grant money. The university investigating itself isn’t meaningful.
> They also kept the grant money.
Is that not the reasonable response if an investigation didn't turn up wrongdoing?
Note both those guys were found guilty for taking government money under false pretenses (to do with fake science, not for doing fake science, which is more supporting evidence that fake science is legal.
The government funds an enormous proportion of research, and they've got a lot more power to do something about it when you make them mad.
What, specifically?
Industry funded research? Results that disagree with the current consensus? Nutrition science entirely?
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
> The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
But buying off a single congressperson is not going to change the worldwide discourse on a topic.
How do you eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time.
How do you corrupt an entire government? One congressperson at a time.
Pick the right one and it might.
Or spend $23,134,000 on all of the House and Senate.
You probably only need 15% of congress. Some of the unbought ones will follow, some would vote for your side anyway, and there are often unrelated things in the bill that will bring a bunch of those who otherwise don't care about this issue with.
In theory, to change discourse, you just need one expert and a few magazine articles and the rest is history.
This is just the time that we caught. Who knows how many more times it happened and wasn't caught?
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught?
It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1]
1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
You're arguing for a pattern based on 1 data point.
It's really good to ask these questions.
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4
But is it the actual sugar, or the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?
That's pretty easy.
If you have a randomized controlled trial, the sugar dose is varied and other confounding variables are controlled by randomization. So you measure the causal impact of sugar only. There are studies showing that.
With observational studies, if you have a dose-dependent effect, then that's good evidence (although not completely conclusive) of a causal relationship. This is what many studies do.
If you have a meta analysis covering many primary studies, and if those vary a lot of context (i.e. countries, year, composition of the population), and you still get a consistent effect, then that's another piece of support for a causal relationship.
The few studies that I've looked at seem to show a pretty robust picture of sugar being a cause, but there might be selection bias - i.e. we'd need an umbrella / meta meta study (which ideally accounts for publication bias) to get the best estimate possible.
Observational studies, and meta analyses relying on them, don't resolve the fundamental problem of causal inference. The best you can do without an experiment is a really clean natural experiment, but those are rare. It's hard to credibly establish a causal relationship without a robust experiment.
What are "the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?" It's been my observation that soda drinkers drink soda all day, no matter what they are doing.
They paid a total of 2 people...
That's not quite what TFA says. Rather:
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).
The department of nutrition at Harvard was founded in 1942.
To be true to Taubes, my memory was too approximate. The actual claim was that in 1976 Fred Stare, the director and founder (in 1942) of the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health was exposed by Michael Jacobson having received around 200.000 dollars in the course of the preceding 3 years from Kellogg's, Nabisco e and their foundations, after he had testified before the Congress about the virtues of cereal as a breakfast food. Apparently this discredited Stare as a scientist.
Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac... And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either. I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
PR can be a lot of bang for your buck.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
You could buy a house and a 69 Charger for $25K in the 60's with a tidy sum left over.
$50k in 2016 dollars.
You're correct, but for some reason heavily downed at the moment (Edit: no longer the case!). Relevant excerpt backing this up:
> the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars
I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.
Average home price in the late 60s was 25k so even if it is equivalent to $50k in 2016 dollars, 25k could still get you further than today in some specific areas.
Some clarification as the actual numbers and the random 25k number keep getting compared to the wrong contexts in this chain (it originally arose as a misunderstanding that the 50k was already in terms of 2016 dollars instead of the original 1960s payment https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CodeWriter23):
~$6,000-$7,000 is the amount the researchers were paid off with in the mid 60s. This is roughly equivalent to ~$50,000 in 2016 when using CPI-U figures.
$25,000 in the mid 60s would be equivalent to ~$193,000 by the same measure, and does not relate to $50,000 in 2016 in any way.
But your core point that the items in the CPI-U basket do not adjust equally, which is why it's a basket in the first place. Median housing price in 2016 was ~$300,000, so ~$193,000 is a bit of variance... but not nearly as much as mixing the numbers from the different comparisons made it sound.
Did you know the average bribe accepted for a politician is something like 5K (This was from a few years back so probably higher now). So yeah this is totally within bribe limits.
As a unrelated note it really is depressing to think about how easy it is to buy off politicians and how much money the bribers have vs an average person.
Ah missed that.
$25,000 in 1969 has the same buying power as approximately $220,000 to $226,000 today
In terms of 2016, from gemini:
> In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.
> Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period
People are just downvoting you rather than discussing for some reason. It drives me bonkers when I see that happen here... :).
rendaw was pointing out the $50k in the article & parent comment was in terms of 2016 dollars, not that the mid 60s $25k in CodeWrite23's comment converts to $50k in 2016.
I.e. that the researchers would not be getting anything close to a house + charger + spare change for just half the $50k amount. They got more like $6k-$7k at time of payment in the mid 60s. Which is still a good chunk of change for the time... just not the amounts it was made to sound.
I doubt that the 50k was given to the research as personal pay. It was likely a “research grant” that was used to fund the research and/or get swallowed up as “overhead” by the university
And you probably earned under $10k/yr.
take me back
Or maybe the combination is the problem. I couldn’t consume much sugar on its own nor much cream but put the two together in ice cream and I could eat it all day long.
That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
>That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
This logic is faulty because both vegans and keto/carnivore people are selected for adherence to diets. If you can stick to either dietary restrictions, you can probably also not pig out on pop tarts or whatever.
That is incorrect, actually. I find it relatively easy to adhere to keto diet. But the moment I try to introduce more "diverse" foods, I gain weight.
Because processed food diet is IMPOSSIBLE to adhere to without gaining weight. Caloric restriction simply doesn't work - your body wants nutrients, not just calories. Which is to say, your willpower will fail sooner or later, unless you find a way of satisfying nutritional needs without excess caloric intake.
>That is incorrect, actually. I find it relatively easy to adhere to keto diet. But the moment I try to introduce more "diverse" foods, I gain weight.
Keto diets might be easier to stick to than calorie counting or whatever, but the fact that you bothered with a diet at all means you're selecting for people who care about their health.
There is also a high chance you selected for people who were not eating well before. Or you selected for people that for genetic reasons are more likely to get fat.
Either way you cannot be sure your selection applies to other people.
GP didn’t say processed foods, but I can see why you went there because it’s a good point. That said, there are also those of us who can’t function without carbs (e.g. if I don’t eat them I will be too weak to work out or run, get light-headed, etc.).
That doesn’t mean they have to be processed, though, or that it requires gaining weight along with them. I personally survive primarily off of clean meats and homemade sourdough bread (which has literally 4 ingredients). If I cut out the bread I get hypoglycemic after runs and pass out. And with it, my weight stays around the same (though I’ve lost maybe 30lb in the last year or so due to just running more and lifting less).
Edit: and when I say “clean meats” I do not mean “lean” meats. Plenty of saturated fats. My bloodwork and other vitals are probably the best my doctor sees all year.
I have noticed exactly the same myself re keto. Also it's probably the easiest diet or regime you can do.
UPF is the new devil as far as I can see, alongside refined sugar.
Also the size and sugar contents of some fruits nowadays is just insane and many still think they're "healthy".
It’s the Randall Cycle.
Nobody cares about fat, except as it influences how well they look. They care about good health. There are many people who would be happy to sit in a wheelchair all day (they probably don't know how uncomfortable that is and would demand extra comfort, but the idea). People don't want to exercise (in general). They want to eat good tasting food. They want to drink, smoke, and do other drugs. They want whatever their religion says is good.
Because these are often in conflict they must compromise something. If you find a way to be fat while: looking good, living a long life, and being able to do the other things in life you want through life people would be happy.
Of course being fat correlates strongly with things people don't like about living a long healthy life and so we try to lose weight, but that is only a proxy.
Excess weight is unhealthy in and by itself, however.
No no, ice cream is good for you. It's fine.
"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...
If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
"generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other"
Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.
But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
People lose weight, temporarily, on all sorts of diets, restricted or not. It is the nature of specific diets that they tend to reduce appetite, and simply following a diet tends to reduce snacking - by virtue of selection bias, mostly (that is, people who are successfully following a diet are by definition people who aren't overeating).
Very traditional diets also tended to include lots of foods that are both highly processed and contain both sugars and fats, like cheese or sweet nut cakes. Paleo diets are a modern invention, and have little in common with the concept of what our ancestors ate. They often have deeply anachronistic ideas, like favoring raw foods, when the use of fire has been a core part of our ancestors consumption since way before Homo Sapiens existed.
I haven't found any paleo dieter that promotes eating solely or even primarily raw foods. That idea seems to be more common in carnivore and vegan communities.
Traditional diets however are still diets that came after the advent of agriculture.
That is not correct.
People lose fat on calorie restricted diet. How will you get to it, either by counting them or by improving metabolism or by changing insulin levels, is a different thing.
Vegan or keto diet can both be calorie restricted, as much as any macronutrient mixture. However, it doesn't mean its sustainable. If you are hungry all the time, you can stay on the diet for some time, but not forever. Since insulin is the primary storage hormone, reducing it will make you less fat (just look at type 1 diabetics). We now know that carbs are the highest promoters of insulin, that fat has 0 influence, and protein some. We have drugs like metformin or GLP-1 that brute force some of it and they are working.
So, we know that sugar is mostly bad and that fat and protein are not. Ofc, some fats are bad for other reasons (by promoting inflamation) but that has nothing to do with obesity.
Thing about the keto diet is that "hungry all the time" simply... doesn't happen. In fact, bigger problem for keto dieters tends to be being satiated all the time and consequently undereating.
"Hungry all the time" is actually vegan thing, but plants have so few calories and pass through so quickly that vegans end up being skinny despite eating literally all the time.
> plants have so few calories
You mean leafs, not plants? Cereals, beans, fruits and some roots have plenty of calories but your true fatty friends are all sorts of seeds and nuts. You also can buy their fat extract: oil.
I think it's an adequate-good-quality-protein-consumption thing rather than a keto specific thing.
It is definitely not protein. I tried carnivore diet for a while (had massive issues tolerating carbs lol), and the higher my protein intake was, more hungry I felt. Reducing protein and increasing fat also increased satiety.
Turns out, it is fats that produce satiety signals, and the effect seems to be by far the strongest with saturated fats, weaker with monounsaturated fats, while polyunsaturated fats actually induce hunger as strongly or even more strongly than carbohydrates do. The idea that "protein induces satiety" is a side effect of the fact that most (though not all) protein foods tend to be quite fatty.
The big question with such foods is are they worse for you just in and of themselves, or do they tend to promote obesity through inducing people to eat more? For the most part, research seems to suggest that as far as weight gain is concerned, calorie is a calorie (whether from fat, carbs, or protein), but some foods seem to induce people to eat more in general, compared to others. (highly processed and high-sugar food seeming to be some of the worst in this regard, but it's not clear exactly what it is about highly processed food that promotes this).
From what I have gathered (through research and by using myself as a guinea pig), there are two things about highly processed food that promote overeating: 1) high carbohydrate content 2) lack of nutrients
High carbohydrate content causes sugar spikes, which leads to insulin spikes, and insulin spikes both a) cause hunger and b) promote storage of energy in the form of body fat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3894001/
Second issue is as I said lack of nutrients. Your body needs nutrients, and will force you to eat until nutritional requirements had been satisfied. Since processed foods have very few nutrients, your organism compensates by increasing dietary intake... which means increasing caloric intake.
I'm skeptical that paleo diet would be healthy for long term. There are studies where they find atherosclerosis in pre-industrial hunter-gatherer remains. It's called HORUS study.
From what I've managed to find in the newest research, it apppears that diet does not appear to have any impact on atherosclerosis itself. But, as they say, more data needed.
This. The amount of faith in nutrition "science" indicates severe science illiteracy in the public.
In general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is wrong in quality and quantity; you can't track enough people for the amount of time where supposed effects would manifest), there is almost zero control over what people eat (diets and available foods even considerably over a decade for whole countries, never mind within individuals), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid category, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree, and each again with different kinds in each category).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects, or the rare results of natural experiments / famines), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
Maybe it'll become actual science one day, but that won't be for decades.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
In this specific case.
Oh yeah, that was another question I had. So was this the only time the sugar industry influenced things? Was there an investigation? Either there was no investigation (why) or it didn't find anything else (?)
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
Ah sorry, 10 years since the revelation about the funding. But yes, decades (over 50 years?) since the single (?) literature review.
I believe they're talking about this UCSF report of a "newly discovered cache of industry documents", which came out in 2016.
You're right to be skeptical, but:
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
That's over half a million, in today's dollars.
With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
Other way around. To quote the article:
> To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...]
So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
… it's $68,404 in today's dollars, according to BLS's inflation calc.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
No, that's already inflation adjusted.
The $50k is already adjusted for inflation.
Ah. My bad, then.
communication before the internet was very slow.
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.
Fraud etc.
This is one of those where you need to be able to discern nuances in your brain as multiple things are happening.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
Correction: they paid at least 2 people, at least $50,000.
Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
> Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
Because vaccines aren't all that profitable compared to other pharmaceuticals but produce disproportionate public good.
Sigh.
The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors.
Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors.
This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research.
https://www.henryford.com/news/2025/09/vaccine-study-henry-f...
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the last one.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx...
I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change.
Edit: The new guidelines are expected to be released today.
https://www.wfla.com/news/national/kennedy-wants-to-end-war-...
> There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is inverted.
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition. That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
The food pyramid went away over twenty years ago. It was discontinued in 2005, and the current guidelines are at https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/myplate which launched in 2011.
Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.
Yes, but I have distinct memories of these nutrition facts being taught to us in school for years, and our teachers asking us to report back how well we conformed to this supposed ideal diet as homework prior to any possible expectation that we children could be informed consumers.
Then I would think the meat, dairy, and egg industry didn't get their money's worth. The My Plate guidelines have protein as less than 25% of the plate, and nothing says it has to be animal based.
The Court has actually ruled that the USDA violated federal law by hiding conflicts of interest in the Dietary Guidelines.
It is beyond insane that these are the official guidelines on what Americans should eat. Why would anyone defend them?
What do you find disagreeable about the My Plate that was linked?
I just told you: it's made by food industry interests and is ultimately divorced from actual nutrition science.
And I'm asking what would be different if you had to make a basic graphic based on nutritional science vs the My Plate graphic.
Dairy is completely unnecessary, for one. Its prominence on the plate makes everything else immediately suspect. There are probably some axes along which a glass of milk or cup of (unsweetened) yogurt is one reasonable option but that's not what is being promoted here.
I see it as more of a limit than a requirement. After all, you can technically satisfy your dietary needs with vegetables and eliminate fruits. But we aren't talking about technicalities and edge cases, rather what a balanced diet might consist of. For many people that does include dairy and fruits, even if neither are completely necessary.
I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here, which has partly been formed by the dairy lobby over the course of every living American’s lifetime. While it is true that we are not the only culture that drinks cow’s milk, it is predominantly a Northern European and later American phenomenon, and the number of people who are intolerant to dairy on some level is very high. I’m not saying a balanced diet cannot consist of dairy, but implying it should, as the plate diagram does, is highly misleading and outright paid for.
"I’m not saying a balanced diet cannot consist of dairy, but implying it should, as the plate diagram does, is highly misleading and outright paid for."
And to exclude it would imply that it cannot be part of a balanced diet. That would be misleading based on the predominate culture.
"I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here,"
I would suggest that you are not aware of the cultural background. The US was colonized by Europeans. Many cultures who immigrated also used milk, cheese, or other dairy products. It makes sense that the guidelines be based on the cultural background of the foods eaten in that country.
Also many Asian countries have nutrition guidelines that include dairy products, not to mention historical cultural foods that do include dairy.
I wouldn’t reduce food to some stupid equational graphic. Instead I would work to try to regain trust by cracking the whip on these companies for once, whether it’s their prices, the quality of their products, their advertising, or all of the above. Our diets deserve more respect and that’s the reason RFK has an audience. He’s speaking to people who believe that. There can be better leaders than him, but at least he’s doing something!
I find Diary to be completely unnecessary and was paid for by the diary industry.
Absolutely. The human body was not meant to process the milk of other animals.
What was it meant to process? Why have some of us evolved tolerance for lactose?
Fruits, roots and vegetables. A tolerance for lactose is not an indication of optimal human food.
Going through that link, it's hard to see where you came to that conclusion? It seems to have pretty reasonable dietary advice.
The food pyramid also seemed like pretty reasonable dietary advice until it wasn't. The skepticism expressed by other posters about where the guidelines originated from is well founded.
> Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.
The RFK jr version of the food pyramid now moves meat and dairy to the biggest section of the pyramid
Even the myplate doesn't seem right. There's probably too much fruit and too much dairy. There isn't any indication of legumes. Vegetables is too vague. There is no indication of fats, which are part of everything else.
But prior to that it was pushed very hard in elementary schools. I remember performing in a school play that was all about the food pyramid and nutrition, in lockstep with the government propaganda at the time.
I just see one lobby, "Big Macronutrient". We all need to eat. I'll be worried when some company tries to make me eat actual plastic.
We know far less about any of this than we pretend to.
> eat actual plastic.
Foreseeing such Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg has already made that one into a movie.
I mean I've seen "low calorie bread" that was basically industrial bread cut with cellulose which is analogous to very fine sawdust.
Cellulose is one of the main constituant of plants and as a fiber, great for your gut:
> In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose
Workshop sawdust would be a bad idea though.
I consider the traditional food pyramid, with grain at the base, to make a lot of economic sense.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
> a significant amount of bookkeeping [...] for the general population
True, but not really more or less than a diet including animal products: in both cases they'll be good by varying the sources of macronutrients. In fact most long-term, healthy vegans don't bother bookkeeping what they eat. Some athletes and weight-loss seeker does but it's not particular to plant-based diet.
Vegan bookeeping is a common fallacy. A while ago I had an odd conversation with a doctor that went like that:
- It's complicated, you'll need to count everything ! - Is it different with animal products ? - Oh yes no count I advise 1-2 serve of red meat every 2 weeks, 2-4 serve of fish per week, 1 serve of seafood once in a while 2 serves of chicken per week, adjusted if you workout. Also 2 diary product per day but avoid salty cheeses too often or in large quantity. - I count 1 pill of b12 per day.
"Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies"
Maybe adults, but probably not the people who were taught the food pyramid - children.
Edit: changed the tense to acknowledge this was in the past. Thought that was obvious since the food pyramid was a thing of the past.
Nit: Children haven't been taught the food pyramid in something like a couple of decades I think. Current model is something like the DailyPlate visual - a plate filled proportionally with various things.
Definitely agree with the concern here, but this is not a problem unique to the food pyramid. Children will be taught all kinds of propaganda if they attend a public school. It's part of the cost, just not the part that is taken from tax dollars.
Who is being taught the food pyramid? Its been 20 years since it was discontinued. I don't know any children being taught it.
I've seen this over and over - adults assuming that what happens in schools today is the same their childhood experience in the classroom, frozen in time.
Parents of school-age children ranting and raving about how the school needs to stop doing X, when it hasn't been that way forever; and they cannot hear it, cannot absorb it, cannot stop talking about it. Something something childhood trauma.
Anecdotally, only the "health focused" people around me understand that the food pyramid was for a different time and based on other interests.
And I don't think adults on a grand scale question it, or process nutrition labels.
Boomers in particular (who engrained Gen x and millennial diets) are most likely to follow grains (and margarine) diets.
Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
Food pyramid was taught when I was in school, but that was before 2011 (as mentioned by another commenter) my own children are in school now and their school lunches align with more modern ideas (veggies and proteins). Certainly could still be improved but I recognize the cost, scale, delivery constraints, plus allergy considerations makes this non-trivial.
Same, I was just assuming the MyPlate recommendations were similarly expected for public schools to follow.
When people say that SNAP (food stamps) should "only be able to buy healthy foods", they have to be reminded what the government considers to be healthy and just importantly, what the government considers to be unhealthy. Since SNAP is a government program, it almost certainly would use government guidelines on what is healthy.
I often hear that argument raised in response to the idea of SNAP covering things like sugary drinks and foods. I'm not sure how SNAP could follow guidelines and also pay for sugary drinks or candy (if those claims are accurate).
Source?
I think the real problem is that a food pyramid is an oversimplification.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
And most likely we will move too far in that direction in the near future. Too many people have their identity, religion, reputation, or paycheck invested in something about how they eat and so are unwilling to take an objective look at things. Instead they find studies that seem to fit their narrative and amplify them. They often will setup their experiments and data to get the results they want. And then we get into the reproducibility problem that science publications often have.
If you do the opposite of whatever Kennedy recommends, you probably wouldn’t be too far off doing the right thing.
Eating nothing but processed foods, sugar, and heavily processed grains? That sounds like the opposite of what Kennedy recommends, which is a recipe for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
Red meat (a known carcinogen) at the top is gold. All that saturated fat the energy will come from (not from protein or veggies) will probably cause heart problems and plaque formation in arteries, not to mention insulin resistance just from increased FFAs in blood.
Vegetarians and vegans have lower T2D incidence on average FWIW.
> Vegetarians and vegans have lower T2D incidence on average FWIW.
Anecdotally, my dad tried vegetarianism for quite a while to address his T2D, but it had no effect. My mom cut out sugar and processed carbohydrates and her T2D was gone in ~3 months or so.
Following any diet is probably better than nothing at all, which could explain the lower incidence of T2D in that group vs the general public. I’d be more curious about the rates in vegetarians/vegans vs people who eat paleo or even carnivore.
Treating T2D and preventing T2D are completely different things from a dietary perspective. Same way you wouldn't give chemotherapy to a healthy person to prevent cancer
> Anecdotally
Then it is of no interest
There are studies that support it. Here is a meta analysis of low carb diets on T2D, the majority show it works, though as always, there is going to be some individual variability.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13098-025-01890-7
Because they don't eat processed foods.
Also, red meat isn't a known carcinogen. Processed meat is. And plaque formation in arteries is a consequence of inflammation... which is caused by sugar, a.k.a. carbohydrates. Insulin resistance is also a consequence of increased carbohydrate consumption.
But as I said, it is a combination of fats and carbs that is the worst killed. Eliminating either one of those from the diet leads to an automatic improvement.
Is this with or without the increase in saturated fat he recommends? Or more red meat?
Health policy decisions would ideally be based on some sort of evidence, not the quackery he spouts.
Yes, some of his changes are an improvement. Most aren’t.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5675784-kennedy-satura... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rfk-jr-upsets-foo...
The most common argument coming from people like you is X is bad because a lack of evidence, and then you present Y as an absolute truth with zero evidence. This time you've linked two garbage websites, both controlled by special interests. You've also fallen into the common trope of discrediting someone's entire view because of another view (so-called "quackery"). Your opinion is relatively consistent with the reddit/HN zeitgeist. That is to say, you are wrong.
Since you present no actual evidence. I won't either. Instead I'll tell you what is coming out as the truth:
1. Carbohydrates and especially sugars contribute more to various disease processes, including CVD, hyperlipidemia, etc than fat or meat consumption. A trivial google search, which you are clearly capable of doing, would show you that.
2. Eggs are loaded with cholesterol and saturated fat. Egg guidelines have been moved almost as often as salt and sugar. Most doctors will not stop you from eating 2-3 eggs a day because the benefits far outweigh the risks.
3. A balanced diet is better than one that isn't. But if you have no choice meat and fat have the highest level of satiation-to-energy of any kind of food.
4. High levels of exercise in combination with a diet higher in foods that have high levels of nutrition (meat, eggs, butter, and green leafy vegetables) will produce less negative health effects than following the government's health guidelines on either exercise or nutrition.
5. The existence of cultures that subsist entirely on meat and fat invalidates your argument. The eskimos, in particular, have comparable life spans and yet hyperlipidemia is extremely common among them. CVD is not. One factor could be the energy consumption due to exercise and extreme cold. The fact obesity, heart disease, cancer, etc risks all rose with the proliferation of highly processed carbohydrate and the "fat-free" trend is further evidence that something is wrong.
6. It is hard to believe anything the government says on nutrition is valid. Back when people watched the news we heard coffee is bad/coffee is good, salt is bad/salt is good, fat is bad/fat is good, meat is bad/meat is good. You should ask yourself seriously if you're getting your information from valid sources or if you just believe whatever the youtube you watch says.
It is possible to overdo nearly anything. Saturated fat guidelines, along with cholesterol guidelines, are likely too low even for conservative values. That being said, the amount of processed carbohydrate you should eat daily should approach 0 and you should consider it to be more of a snack if you eat it at all.
> Since you present no actual evidence.
It’s his food pyramid and his departments advice.
https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
As for him being a quack, that’s earned through his refusal to follow scientific guidance, and sacking the guidance available. You’re presumably aware of his views on fluoride and vaccines.
What's wrong with not wanting flouride in my food and drink?
It's a "meme" that sugar is worse for you than fat?
Yes and also a true meme.
What annoys me the most is that sat fat is a huge way that sugary products are made more palatable to people. People love butter. It is every chef's 2nd favorite tool, just after salt.
Butter is only a favorite because Lard has been some demonized that no chef would ever use it anymore.
That, and the only readily available form of lard stinks of rancid hog.
Approximately nobody has access to high quality leaf lard like the food blogs champion.
Chefs use animal fats all the time. They think about cooking temperature, flavor, etc to make decisions.
Ever spread lard on toast? Do you prefer croissants made with lard? Is everyone's favourite dish these days lard chicken (I mean the Indian dish, not the Soul Food dish, which is of course popular in some locales).
Nope. Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous. Nothing to do with Big Cow or any special interest lobby local to certain valleys in the USA. Except maybe Big Bacon Drippings, because if there's one thing better for a grill cheese than butter it's bacon grease (thick-sliced sourdough bread, sharp Cheddar cheese, a shmear of chili crisp)
Now, suet has been demonized to the point that nobody makes suet pudding any more. A shame, really.
> Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous
Oily stuff tastes unctuous.
Butter is favored because most people had it in their youth. Some regions loves Nato and Chicken feet, others cheese and oysters. What's the most delicious? It depends of your own history.
I spread olive oil on my toast and prefer the croissants made with that as well. My favorite dish is fried tempeh.
Butter is NOT favored because most people had it in their youth, but because of its extremely distinct flavour.
"Unctuous" is certainly not specific enough, the reason butter (and ghee) is so delicious is its butteriness, i.e. it has a highly distinct taste. All properly rendered animal fats have highly distinct tastes and serve different purposes. Schmaltz tastes slightly of chicken, duck fat of duck, lard of pork, and tallow of beef.
But butter does NOT distinctly taste of beef, rather, it is reminiscent of slightly-aged milk (or, in the case of ghee, it may even strongly smell like certain kinds of aged cheese). There is, also, in butter, significant absorbed water content, and, to my palate, even a very subtle acidity that is not quite present in other rendered animal fats that give it a sort of brightness that make it work in things like butter-creams and other delicate or mild flavours (e.g. popcorn).
It is IMO this specifically "non-meaty" unctuousness that is the real draw of butter. Not some childhood nostalgia.
Wouldn't the preferred fat of a culture be spread between countries as they interacted then? Instead it has been fairly one directional with butter being adopted globally but other fats remaining niche (except Olive oil). Is that because of imperialism or is it because it is the best tasting one?
Today, I am one of the Ten Thousand [1] that learned you can make croissants with olive oil. Thank you for that! I've always assumed the laminated dough required solid fats, but apparently any layering of fat and flour can make flaky goodness. I am guessing that liquid fats are probably harder to work with, and croissants are already tricky enough to get right: but I must try.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Yes, lamination can be done with almost any fat, but the more you laminate (more layers / folds), the more that liquid fats sort of absorb into the dough, and stop having the desired separating effect. So while oil layering works well for e.g. paratha-style roti, scallion pancakes, and things that only really get one or two "layers" or "folds", oil is just fine. But when you get to something like a croissant, or even just a rough puff pastry (e.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/old-fashioned-flaky-pie-dough-re...), liquid fats are usually a complete non-starter.
You might be able to achieve something if you can somehow freeze your olive oil and chill your dough, and work very quickly during lamination, but you should, even with a lot of work and tweaking, still expect to get a noticeably inferior product for something like croissants.
Depending on how picky you are/not, you might still be personally happy with the texture and taste, but don't expect to get even remotely close to an actual good butter croissant, by more objective standards. Here in Canada we had a minor problem with the butter texture due to what we feed our cows here ("buttergate"), and this was preventing professional bakers from achieving quality croissants with just the Canadian butter. This should make you highly skeptical that you can get anything good with something as different as olive oil.
Still, I do love the idea of an olive oil croissant, it would be delicious.
Okay, so as expected liquid fats are much harder to work with and lead to an inferior flake. But, I assumed it was nigh impossible to do. If I can get 20% of the way there with olive oil I would be at least willing to try.
You can definitely get to 20% without much trouble, maybe even 30-50%, if you do some freezing tricks. Though what such percentages mean is highly subjective.
I am thinking if an ideal butter croissant has some flaky fluffiness (perhaps if we define it as "trapped volume" between flakes), and we define this ideal flakiness to be 100%, then you can extremely easily get to 20% with just olive oil. Frankly I think you might even get close to 50% (defined in this way) provided you also start with a trustworthy recipe by mass and that aims for proper hydration (e.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/croissants-recipe-11863500) and work quickly with lots of chilling.
Just, subjectively, you might realize that 20-50%, defined this way, isn't much like a proper French croissant, and is more like a cheap doughy supermarket chain croissant—which I do still frankly enjoy sometimes anyway!
I didn't say lard is always better. Different cooking styles demand different things.
Though my grandpa used lard on his bread in the great depression because they couldn't afford butter.
As a kid I had both lard and butter on bread. Bras with lard and onions is amazing. But also that’s roughly the only combination of that works. Butter is way more versatile.
Perhaps this is a different usage of the word "bra" than I am used to but it sounds uncomfortable.
Excuse me? The trendiest of restaurants around me advertise that they have beef fat fried fries/potatoes.
Do your own research, it's not that hard:
* Select a subset of diets that might fit your lifestyle.
* Make a list of categories you consume: refined sugars, all kinds of fats, gluten, dairy.
* Look for published papers on diets and categories.
I did a few dramatic changes throughout my life based on researches I did, not the hype. The first one was refined sugars for me and my kids - they didn't have a single cavity in baby and now permanent teeth. Pediatric dentist actually it's impressive, but little sugar here and there wouldn't harm with proper hygiene. One thing I learned about medical doctors is that they are not scientists, and unless they follow a protocol to diagnose and treat you, their opinion is often B.S. For adult, removing refined sugars reduced body fat percentage over time, but what's most important - lipid panel came to normal in about a year.
I have IBS, and what I did was literally that I kept a list of foods and symptoms they cause me.
Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
To add another data point: I love sweet things and eat a lot of desserts and sugar. I'm in my late 30s, and I've never had a cavity or weight issues. My BMI is around 21.
I'm not recommending sugar; my point is that anecdotes mean very little for this type of general diet advice.
How strict was your elimination of sugar? Did you find a gradual trend of your lipid profile over the course of a year, or was it more sudden?
It's fairly basic nutrition education that cutting out or reducing refined sugar intake will reduce cavities and reduce body fat. It's all about the amount you consume them in amongst the rest of your diet.
It's not new evidence, science or research that says you should reduce your refined sugar intake.
The new dietary guidelines are much more sensible IMO, compared to the food pyramid or MyPlate.
https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
The scientific report is much more detailed: https://cdn.realfood.gov/Scientific%20Report.pdf
I agree with siblings that nothing jumps out (to my non-expert eye) as "very extreme".
EDIT: Removed long-winded snark after a more careful reading of the linked document.
I don't see anything extreme, but the primacy of proteins (and especially meat-based protein) and dairy seem suspicious considering the broader rhetoric coming out.
I wonder if a US economy would be able to function if people at scale ate more healthily and sustainably. That would mean less of most things and more of vegetables, legumes, greens, all that unsexy stuff that is much less labour and energy intensive.
The second order effects of not having to grow food for our food, and grow food for ourselves in the first place instead are probably too negative.
> Protein serving goals: 1.2–1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, adjusting as needed based on your individual caloric requirements.
it's crazy the us gov put this out and is still using kilograms for this formula
anyway, i don't find anything here that stands out or is obviously against the consensus, other than recommending tallow as a cooking fat. i don't see any signs of seed oil extremism or sat fat trutherism otherwise. there's even this line about limiting sat fat:
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
It recommends eating more saturated fats from dairy and meat, both of which are very bad for CVD.
"The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke." PMID 32562735 - Jun 2020, Journal of the American College of Cardiology
Saturated fat isn't bad for CVD, unless you eat it together with carbohydrates.
> In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories. Significantly limiting highly processed foods will help meet this goal. More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.
So that ends up being roughly 20 grams of saturated fat. I still consider that quite high, given that there is a strong correlation between saturated fat consumption and CVD.
> there is a strong correlation between saturated fat consumption and CVD
Reference? Many of the old studies have been proven flawed and, no surprise, corrupt [1]. Recent studies seem to suggest that it's only linked for some people.
Disclaimer: I am nearly uneducated with this topic, but find it increasingly hard to trust anything nutrition related, where big money is involved.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/
While I don't have studies on hand, I recommend watching `Viva Longevity!` on YouTube. He makes a case for the Ancel Keys studies, and why saturated fat is bad and why fiber is good.
It's been nearly a year or two since I've looked into it, but basically there is a lot of money in marketing for the beef and dairy industries, and that includes lobbying and influencing the outcomes of scientific studies. It's worth scrutinising claims against the Ancel Keys studies soley based on the fact, in my opinion.
I really wish people would stop sharing that article as if it means anything. Nina Teicholz is not who you should be getting your science from.
Her views are not the scientific consensus. She is not a scientist, she is a journalist with an agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Teicholz
Neither should we have trusted Ancel Keys, but here we are
Fair enough! I was not aware of that. But she's far from the only one. There appears to be a wall of meta-analysis stating the same, but again, I'm naive and just googling.
I guess avocados and coconuts aren't manly enough.
> To Make America Healthy Again, we must return to the basics.
Who knows, these guidelines might indeed be sensible, but anything labeled “Make America Healthy Again” has no scientific credibility.
The dumb marketing label lowers the credibility that I'll expect to find good science in it. It in no way defines what the actual scientific credibility should be though.
A good book that explains it all is The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes, which came out the same year as this article.
Like many truths, it's actually well-known and frequently discussed in public, but hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging and decades of bad dietary 'advice' from both public and private institutions.
To paraphrase the Oracle in the Matrix: What's really going to bake your noodle later on is--saturated fat isn't the culprit in CVD either. And that's equally well-supported yet drowned out for the same reasons ('nonfat all the things!').
> hard to hear amongst all the noise of corporate messaging
The one I like are the sodas that tout "made with real sugar" as if that's better for you than HF syrup.
Turns out the phosphoric acid breaks down the sucrose within a matter of months on the shelf.
Given soda ph around 2.5, temperature 25C, phosphoric acid 0.05% and sucrose 10% gives a half life around 4 years. Or only 7% over 6 months.
“… but hard to hear amongst all the noise …”
A well placed warning label makes it a little easier to hear:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
Yep. And thanks for the recommendation.
I am currently reading The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.
That's a good one. Taubes also has a (more well known book) called Why We Get Fat.
Nina Teicholz is not who you should be getting your dietary advice from. She has no qualifications.
Here’s a gift link to a NYT article that was posted a few minutes ago:
Kennedy Flips Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat and Whole Milk
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/well/rfk-jr-food-pyramid-...
At the top of the pyramid there are also vegetables. For some reason that is left out in some of the media converge.
Kennedy said to avoid the sugary, processed foods that he labels as poisonous to health. (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Mr. Kennedy said (Does any sane person disagree with this?)
These evil people want us sick and hospitalized with chronic disease from eating this crap. Now that it's political, hopefully people will see it for the bullshit it really is.
The food pyramid was published by the department of agriculture, it’s always been propaganda.
Thanks to the dedicated work of Edward Bernays... nephew of Sigmund Freud ... and the Creel Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
When Lucky Strike needed more women to smoke cigarettes in the late 1920s, it turned to Bernays.
So the dairy industry still hasn’t gotten its day in court.
For those like myself who didn't know, CVD = cardiovascular disease.
As a child of the 1980s, I feel so cheated that we were told to eat "5 servings of grains a day" pointing to bread and pasta -- when so many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar in the sauce.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
Bread with sugar in it is problematic, but that doesn't mean all bread is bad. That would be like saying that boiled potatos are as unhealthy as french fries. Or rolled oats vs. sugary industrial cereals. Whole grains are actually really healthy.
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.
3-2-4-4 / day, I was told in California. Excess grains made sense in the old days when food was more expensive. Grains are cheap and easily stored. They powered progress through the 19th and 20th centuries, and only became problematic for the majority when physical labor became less common, simultaneously with the low-fat craze.
> many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar
Presumably "5 servings of grains a day" assumes no added sugar, otherwise it would say "5 servings of grains and some sugar a day".
I don't feel so violently on one side of this or another, but I agree with the spirit of your comment as a child of the 80s.
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
Aren't both sugar and saturated fat problemtic, and complementary in contributing to CVD?
High-fat high-carb diet certainly is. There is however no conclusive data that high-fat low-carb diet OR low-fat high-carb diet contribute to CVD.
I wonder if this is because it has less to do with fat and carbs and more to do with processed foods.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
When people say "fat" is bad for you, they mean saturated fat. Mediterranean diet is quite low on saturated fat, while still having the good fats.
Cochrane systematic reviews should make you seriously question whether the Mediterranean diet really is much good at all - hard data is inconclusive and low quality [1].
In general we really even barely have enough nutritional knowledge to say if the term 'good fats' even makes much scientific sense, but broad and vague things like "Mediterranean diet" are just total nonsense, from the standpoint of serious nutrition science.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6414510/
That seems to be searching for RCT's, which, I'm not surprised would struggle to replicate. Most of these had a duration of less than 5 years, while dietary related health outcomes are the result of decades of following a pattern. It's possibly also unethical, in some cases (i.e. the existence of effective LDL lowering medication would likely complicate things).
Many people seem to disregard epidemiology, especially when it comes to nutrition (I think because it tends to support unpopular positions). But epidemiology has performed some excellent feats in the name of public health: cholera, smoking, pfao.
It is unfortunate that the large time-lines on these things make more rigor difficult, but I wouldn't throw out the epidemiology.
Epidemiology should generally be disregarded when it comes to nutrition.
There are exceptions when there are rare natural experiments (e.g. I forget the country, but the European one where some issue caused all flour for the country to be only whole-wheat, which led to clear nutrient deficiencies due to the phytic acid there) but in general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is not just quantitatively but qualitatively wrong, and you can't track enough people nearly long enough), there is virtually no control whatsoever (diets and available foods shift considerably over just decades), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid taxon, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
But even setting that aside, you can't define or study "Mediterranean diet" rigorously even in RCTs, so I don't see how you can think you are going to get much of anything here from epidemiological work that is going to lead to anything practically actionable.
Notably, the epidemiological study people like to dump on the most, largely did use natural experiments (i.e. they chose regions, that, at the time, had very traditional diets, without the convenience of supermarkets to mess it all up). They also didn't rely solely on food surveys, but actually measured the meals.
But all that aside, I don't actually follow a Mediterranean diet, and agree that one has to be careful here, because it is not well defined (or, it might be in some circles, but that differs from what the general population might expect).
The only reason I mentioned it was in response to
> The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat.
Where I was pointing out that the fats in the Mediterranean diet (by pretty much every measure of what it means to be a Mediterranean diet), are not saturated, and it is usually saturated fats that are considered "bad".
That is, all I was trying to do was clear up the (common!) confusion about fats (they are not all the same).
Fair, the term may have been well-defined and measured in the original study, or in some specific circles. I was definitely thinking of the meaningless general thing "Mediterranean diet" has metastasized into today.
I also think it is better, rhetorically, to not draw support for the badness of saturated fats / differences of different fats by referencing the Mediterranean diet, since this rather looks like drawing upon narrow / weak science to support something that is in fact much more broadly supported by a larger variety of more careful work.
But yes, it is very important that people recognize there are huge differences here!
There are so many differences in lifestyle between the regions that they studied and other places that it is absurd to attribute the outcomes confidently to the diet. Especially when stress is a well known CVD risk in itself.
This sounds like they didn't think about it at all. Of course they did, and sure, their techniques were not as sophisticated as today. But there have been plenty of follow-up studies that have controlled more rigorously for those things, and it turns out they were probably right?
Also, the 7 countries study didn't just compare the regions, they also did intra-regional comparisons. Not that I think this particular study is what you should base all your evidence on, but, most others back it up.
The people who run these studies actually know what they are doing. They know the limitations of their methods, and, they have thought about confounding variables. This _always_ comes up in internet debate, like, "ahh, but there are confounding variables so the study must be trash!". It's literally their job to take those confounding variables into account. They don't just grab random people of the street to run these things. And I assure you, they know about the details.
> There is however no conclusive data that high-fat low-carb diet ... contributes to CVD.
Have to be a little careful with this claim. Dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are problematic either way.
No, they are not. Dietary cholesterol has little to zero impact on blood cholesterol, and saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful either, when accounting for other influences.
> Dietary cholesterol has little to zero impact on blood cholesterol
The "well, actually" point on this is that dietary saturated fat drives blood cholesterol levels more strongly than dietary cholesterol. But it is not true that dietary cholesterol has "zero impact," and it is not true that "saturated fat we don't have reliable data that points to it being harmful." High-cholesterol foods are typically high in saturated fat, so these things are kind of intertwined.
Yes. Sugar (and all of its downstream phenomena - diabetes, insulin resistance, the ease in which sugar adds calories without satiation signals) is well established to contribute to CVD. Long-chain (animal based) sat fat and trans fat is also well established to contribute to CVD. The high calorie density of fatty foods plays a big role, as does the overall palatability and "eatability" of low fiber, high fat, high sugar, delicious foods, making portion control challenging. That should be uncontroversial at this point.
The jury is unclear on:
- How the chain length of sat fats impact things (medium-chain triglycerides seem to be protective, but the boundary between medium and long is fuzzy)
- How the ratio of the various omega-N (3/6/9) unsat fats impacts health, particularly inflammation
- The whole "seed oil" thing is probably MAHA/conspiracy style false signal at the end of the day, but it hasn't been fully debunked and there are almost certainly facets of truth to it (seed oils are a form of ultra-processed food, and all UPFs are problematic)
Confounders, confounders everywhere. This whole field is just extremely challenging and noisy.
Sugar doesn't cause insulin resistance or (type 2) diabetes. Both are a result of being overweight.
Of course, you can get overweight by eating too much sugar, but it's really about not eating too many calories long-term, regardless of the source.
And of course, refined sugar isn't healthy at all and consumption should be kept to a minimum, outside of exercise.
Carbohydrates do cause insulin resistance and diabetes. India has average BMI of 21,9, yet has very high incidence of diabetes - largely thanks to its carbohydrate-based diet.
There are many people with type 2 diabetes that are not overweight; and also many people with overweight and even obesity who do not develop type 2 diabetes. The estimate is that around 537 million people have diabetes worldwide, while overweight and obesity is estimated to affect 1.1 billion people.
Needs (2016) in the title - and all big industry plays these games with "science".
to the point that sadly, science = f(economy)
One very minor side (art?) project I am doing:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
… is a pushback of sorts on the sugar industry.
If I were to design a warning label I would take inspiration from the Australian tobacco warning labels, quite gruesome medical imagery of rotted teeth. Restricting the form of advertisement would be a start, like USA tobacco regulations.
Not sure if this has been posted (I see stephenwoo has mentioned him further down), but it's a break-down of how sugary foods damage the body, particularly fructose.
It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Has any one successfully code with same focus after cutting sugar? Seems sugar is really important for focus. Whats your experience?
I have never heard of anyone using sugar to "focus," if you want to focus take amphetamines or cocaine.
I don't code, but I do know that not eating sugar significantly improves my focus no matter what I'm doing.
That's addiction. You'll need time to get out of it.
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
I did keto for a few months a long time ago (2010/2011). This was early in my career and long coding and debug sessions were a normal part of my day-to-day.
There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.
I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?
Personal experience. Then I found many well known programmers shared the same experience online. It feels deliberate work without sugar. ie. if coding = work + fun. without sugar its just coding = work. It does not get any better after 3 days or so too.
It might feel good but spiking your blood sugar isn't healthy for you, and the crashes afterwards will get worse over the years. Improving metabolic health might be a better long term solution; have you explored how endurance or high intensity exercise affects your focus?
Been coding while fasting on keto and it's absolutely amazing. Fasting is hard socially, being ketogenic puts a bit more stress on my kidneys, but for me (adhd) it's amazing.
remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate
If anything focus gets better without sugar and excessive carbs for me - but those work well for outdoors or workouty days I find.
Definitely, carbs means alternating drowsy, hunger cycles with blood sugar level. While an even level enables the zone.
Why are you cutting out sugar, unless you mean reduce. But you shouldn't stop eating sugar, its required, just not in excessive amounts.
Not required to eat any sugar at all. Your body will actually produce its own glucose if and when needed through gluconeogenesis [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
Yes it can and it does that when there is an absence of available glycogen provided through carbohydrates, it is not to replace but to support in addition to appropriate sugar intake. It is a less efficient source of glucose, does not provide a large enough amount for exercise and also uses amino acids from muscle to help. Do this long enough and you end up in ketosis which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Why neglect one aspect of our bodies digestive energy systems for just gluconeogenesis. Wouldn't you be better off eating a balanced meal of complex carbohydrates and unsaturated fats. Our bodies have multiple pathways to producing energy, focusing on using only one is silly and not the right approach because it wasn't designed to be that way.
Just because our bodies can survive doing a particular thing in the absence of another, doesn't mean that thing we're absent of isn't required.
Its optimal to solve all the constraints or requirements of needs of the body. But we don't fully understand the requirements as a whole and conflicting information from expertsh. So the rational thing is to rely on the historical data and make judgements on the probability.
If you're addicted to cocaine, then cocaine is really important for focus. Same for sugar. If sugar is really important for focus for you, then you're likely heading for diabetes type 2.
This isn't really a correct narrative. Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with CVD. Sugar is also correlated with poor metabolic health which is also correlated with CVD. Both are bad.
Best data is still Mediterranean- nuts, fruits vegetables, olive or avocado oil, and lean protein.
The so-called "Mediterranean diet" is a myth, and one of many myths that even serious "nutrition scientists" believe and perpetuate. Actual people in the Mediterranean have way different diets, and ones that include significant quantities of things like pork, lamb, fatty fish, very sugary confections, processed meats like sausages or jamon, etc.
I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.
Mediterranean diet is basically a lie, though. If you look at the healthiest Mediterranean populations, they eat a lot of saturated fat.
Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.
I've been to the Mediterranean several times. They eat a ton of (delicious) super oily food, sausages, meats, eggs, fish (often fried or deep fried), salty cheeses, greasy stuff, tons of white bread, lots of wine. Fat chance to find someone eating avocados, kale, or quinoa, and proteins are not at all minimized.
The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.
Countries in the mediterranean have been developing the same bad habits as elsewhere. People in the Mediterranean need to go back to eating a Mediterranean diet.
Fruit and veg can be contaminated with sprays as well unfortunately.
The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.
I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.
Sprays?
Fertiliser, insecticide, herbicide (for controlling certain weeds etc)...
Mediterranean diet is nonsense. Ill-defined, doesn't have clear evidence of a relation to CVD in hard studies. Bad that people still believe this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6414510/
Doesn't both sugar and saturated fat contribute to CVD if consumed in excess?
Sugar got into all the meal we have, and because it is so addictive, we went for it. Fatty meals are more healthy, especially for me, but will get you sick in no time, unless you eat healthy fats (olive oil, olives especially). The trans fats are carcinogenic
So most of these fat people today are a result of the low fat doctrine forged in the 70’s?
Many such cases.
Yes.
It would be cool if researchers weren't so easily bought. I thought the sciences attracted people of strong moral character but it would appear not.
Which will make you fatter?
Correct answer: BSugar enters your blood stream almost immediately --- starting in your mouth. Unless you're doing heavy exercise and burning lots of calories, your body has to store most of this excess energy --- as fat.
The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
Note that a kg of fat contains about 9000 calories, while a kg of sugar contains about 4000 calories, so this is really a startling claim, if true
It's not given the ratios
OP should have said for calorie-adjusted intake sugar is more fattening.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7598063/
> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.
Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...
There's more nuance to this.
Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.
But also
Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.
Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.
This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.
At the same weight, fat contains way more calories than sugar, so the difference in difficulty of digestion is irrelevant at this level. It's true that if you were to consume 1000 Cal worth of sugar vs 1000 Cal worth of fat, you'd get slightly less fat from the fat - but this should be seen simply as one of many limitations on the "calories in" measurement. The same kinds of differences likely exist between different sugars, different fats, different proteins - and may well be affected by other aspects of how the food containing these nutrients is consumed; and it almost certainly varies a lot between people or even for the same person based on various factors such as age, activity level, time of day, etc.
> The only way to get consumed fat into your bloodstream is to first convert it into sugar --- which itself burns some energy.
Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.
Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.
But it will always prefer glucose stores over fat.
And the muscles. You can’t fight or flight if you have to ask the liver to deliver glycogen. That’s how anaerobic exercise works. You have the fuel but not enough oxygen to burn it so you burn it fuel rich and oxidizer poor.
Not quite. The body will just enter ketosis if glucose and glycogen levels are too low.
The grandparent means something a bit different. Muscles can use glucose without _oxygen_ to get short bursts of energy quickly by rearranging glucose molecules (indirectly) into lactic acid.
Ketones can't be used for this purpose.
My understanding was that atherosclerotic plaques are comprised of cholesterol or fatty deposits [1] and that these can lead to CVD.
The fat mechanism I understand, but what is the mechanism for sugar in CVD?
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...
CVD requires a bunch of events to happen in sequence, I always felt like it was a combination of risk factors + luck that make a heart attack or aneurysm happen.
1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins
2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls
3. LDL gets oxidized
4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques
5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.
Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.
It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.
And the liver produces triglycerides from fructose which is half of sugar.
Consuming cholesterol doesn't normally change the level of cholesterol in your bloodstream - it simply leads to your body producing less cholesterol. Unless you're consuming gigantic amounts, or have some problems with your cholesterol regulation, dietary cholesterol is completely safe. It's only if your blood work shows elevated cholesterol levels that you need to start paying attention to cholesterol intake. This is in fact very similar to what happens to blood sugar levels, in fact.
Pretty much every health authority will tell you that high blood sugar damages blood vessels, thereby enabling the formation of said plagues.
Healthy adults consuming some dietary sugar doesn't cause persistent high blood sugar, though. That's diabetes.
it's not just sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Grouping
all simple carbs are the devil, but we can't possibly feed billions of people actually healthy food - organic vegetables, nuts, and animal products, so come drink your corn syrup.
The sugar industry (topic of this article) can only be blamed for sugar, though -- not all high-GI foods.
And you can replace "sugar" in what I said earlier with "high-GI foods" and it doesn't change a thing. Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
>Persistent high blood sugar is diabetes; it isn't dietary.
how is it not dietary if consuming most carbs spikes your blood sugar for hours, which, with three meals + snacks + starbucks slurry, means elevated blood sugar 20+ hours a day?
It doesn't happen in non-diabetic people. It's different in type 2 diabetics who will see large swings in blood fat and glucose after meals.
Please can you provide a source for the above?
Sugar causes inflammation, and inflammation damages arteries. It is this damage that then leads to accumulation of fatty deposits, as damaged arteries basically lose the protective layer (think of equivalent to a non-stick coating). But that doesn't mean dietary fat is what actually caused the plaque.
Poor dental health also contributes and nothing pushes poor dental healthy like a high sugar diet.
Should make flour from it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266716032...
I feel like the same thing is happening now… processed foods have less sodium and I feel are more sugary. I don’t live a sedentary lifestyle…I need salt for hydration and muscle contraction. I find the new nutrition guidelines for sodium lacking.
The 2016 JAMA paper illustrates how funding sources can shape research focus, reinforcing the value of transparency and multiple lines of evidence in nutrition research.
I avoid sugar pretty thoroughly, but my cholesterol is high because I can't walk past a breakfast sandwich. This an n=1 observation.
What does "industry" mean. Which firms were involved? Were all firms involved?
I mean, anecdotal but I suffered metabolic syndrome. Cut out all carbs, increased my fat intake. This led to a loss of 50 pounds, my blood fat and blood cholesterol dropped, liver enzymes in the blood dropped, insulin resistance reversed, blood pressure dropped, and according to my blood, everything is now normal.
Big sugar exaggerated the skinny on fat?
This is on HNs homepage because it confirms what we want to believe about our favorite foods: saturated fat = bad is just a sugar industry psy-op!
But notice how "Sugar industry blames [saturated] fat for CVD" doesn't mean it's good for you. Their motive is to sell you sugar.
Just like finding evidence of the meat/dairy industry sowing FUD on saturated fat doesn't mean it's bad for you. Their motive is to sell you saturated fat.
We should instead look at our best converging contemporary evidence on how saturated fat impacts human heath outcomes, not wank off to blog posts like this.
Sorry to say but I see a lot of ill informed takes here on sugar, fats and their 'correlation' with CVD.
To put it bluntly, jut eat maintenance calories with most of it coming from good protein sources and eat good amount of fibre. No, dietary cholesterol isn't gonna kill you, nor is sugar but obviously that doesn't mean you eat tons of them.
And the most important is enough sleep and WORKOUTTTT. 240 min of cardio and resistant training combined. Is that a lot to do?
Why do you need to optimize each and every aspect of each nutrition? "Oh, I don't eat meat because it is correlated to heart disease, so I consume dairy. Oh wait it isnt exactly digestible so I consume vegetables. Oh wait, I will have to eat like KGs and Kgs of veggies to meet the nutrient requirement. Oh wait, that means I am eating tons of carbs". How about you stop brushing your ego and just keep it simple by having a sense of number of calories you want and then eat enough protein from natural sources.
Yeah, for sure if you have any beliefs which prevents you from eating something then by all means find alternatives and have processed food. Processed food is not necessarily bad. Whey protein is processed but it is very important for vegetarians. What grinds my gears is this push to find the ideal diet. Vegans hate carnivores. Carnivores make fun of vegans for eating veggies. Like bro, shut up.
Related (reason why OP submitted this today?):
Eat Real Food – Introducing the New Pyramid
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529237
A casual look at where people live the oldest, what they eat, and what's recommended tell you all you need to know about food recommendations then and now.
It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.
I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.
The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
A casual look at where people live the oldest will tell you about statistical outliers and bad government recordkeeping.
Don't forget pension fraud and identity theft.
I think avoiding industrially processed food is wise, but it eliminates 99% of restaurant food and 90% of prepared food in almost any setting, only exception being about half the stuff at a salad bar.
Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.
Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.
It doesn't have to be a religion. I don't care when I eat out. The point is not to be absolutely consistant. It's just the guideline I use regarding what I eat.
I don't really eat prepared food. I mostly buy whole food to be used as ingredients. Cooking simple meals is not particularly hard. I think most people overestimate the complexity and time requirement involved.
> The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food.
It is also surprisingly hard in practice. There are so many foods that on the label are supposed to be whole foods or low processed but then when you read the ingredients do you realize you've been bamboozeld.
For me avoiding processed foods is not that hard, I only eat whole foods like vegetables and fruits (where I live there are no labels on these whole foods). I know that this is not doable for most of you, but it can be done if you want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_diet
This is a complete myth. Human populations are not homogenous, gene pools that relied on agriculture for the last 10k years are completely different than hunter gatherer populations. You have been lied to
The diversity in individual micro-biome ecosystems now walks into the room
Which myth? I have genuine trouble understanding what you disagree with.
Industrially processed food is a very recent invention. I'm not talking about modern fad like the Nova classification here. I don't care about bread as long as it's made with water, yeast and flour. I just don't want my food to contain any recent additives.
My take is basically that if it was fine a thousand years ago, it's probably ok-ish minus everything we know now to be poisonous. The blind spot is obviously plant selection and modern varieties being different but well, that's ok, nothing is perfect.
I'm used to CAD as the acronym for this thing, but I'm just being pedantic
Maybe I read too much history - but hasn't Big Sugar been known for "nothing that a slave trader wouldn't do" ethics for the past 300+ years?
It is beyond me how anyone can expect any business (especially public traded) to have any ethics whatsoever.
In strong democracies, regulations provide the incentive.
..and you think those work?
Of course they do, if enforced. The number of eight year-olds working in factories is substantially lower than it used to be due to regulations. *in modern democracies
>if enforced..
There lies the problem...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528718
If you do regulate. We currently have full regulatory capture in most industries and regulators that are doing their jobs are either hamstrung or the laws are so far behind the industries that they can’t or won’t work.
The key to proper regulation is to keep money and influence from pooling at the top, making it difficult for any single person to buy enough influence.
As it is, we have a dozen monopolies that should be broken up that are making a small section of the population so rich they are essentially above laws.
But, proper regulation can exist if people want it, and more specifically in the case of the USA, legislators want it. Unfortunately, Dems actively prevent it, and republicans are ripping it down, so the rest of us are kinda fucked.
Regulations can work if bypassing the regulation in question does not open up a market that is large enough to keep paying off the regulators.
For example, if there is only one regulator for a country, the companies can pay millions to get it eased up for them, because they can make billions from it.
But if there one regulator for each state, they equation will change and it might not be profitable to pay millions to a regulator of the state, because they cannot make enough profit from selling in the state to justify it.
That is the only way to make it work. Rules don't work forever. Incentives do.
We literally had a circular slave trade of slaves->sugar cane->rum->slaves
They’re out there. I find it more productive to search for and financially support such businesses, rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take.
For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.
Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
>I find it more productive to search for and financially support such businesses, rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take...
But sadly, many order of magnitude more people would like to just make more money when invest. Which is why..
>Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built,
> rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take...
Capitalism does not imply public trading. Capitalism can work even when companies re-invest parts of their profits.
Oh no, that would be too slow. We want Speeeed...even if that means a quick descent into certain doom.
>many order of magnitude more people would like to just make more money when invest
Blame them (the consumers) then. This is like that silly Reddit/Twitter stat about 10% of companies creating 90% of global emissions… which the companies are doing in the process of making the shiny cell phones and laptops all the consumerists lambasting them are posting from, plus all the plastic crap they buy every day from Amazon.
The consumers are the ones demanding unchecked expansion of their consumption. As long as that demand exists, companies will find a way to fill it, whether they’re doing so in America or other countries. Privately held entities can’t allocate capital fast enough to keep up with the consumerists.
cant blame the consumers who are brainwashed by the ads that uses every weakness in human nature to create phantom needs, making up artificial demand for things..
Sure, but do you trust Big Butcher?
And of course big sugar is these days just big corn which is happy selling to CAFOs.
Not when so much meat has sugar added to it.
Sugar makes an excellent spice, not a primary ingredient. It's really useful for grilling for instance.
Based on the history of the past 1-ish century, I trust Big Meat & Dairy to have less capability for and competence at evil than Big Sugar. Because otherwise we'd have been hearing far more "Fat is Fine, Carbs are Crap" messages.
> I trust Big Meat & Dairy to have less capability for and competence at evil
Why? You've never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag?
Well, there's the whole atkins and keto fads...
And Atkins really started picking up in the 90s which was
https://web.archive.org/web/20120629041358/http://www.ers.us...
Oh hey right after beef CAFOs started dominating the industry.
Surely you jest as the animal agriculture industry is many times larger than any "big sugar" boogeyman.
"Bigger = Badder" is quick & easy heuristic, but not a particularly accurate one.
It is when it comes to slaughtering 80 billion sentient animals each year.
I feel like I hear that a lot.
Well, there are essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but no essential carbs.
Well, it's true that in the 17th century, sugar and rum production involved one of the most heinous forms of slavery ever to exist. What's not clear is that this necessarily has anything to do with the present; after all, slaves were emancipated a long time ago.
I think this is an instance of "large corporations in the 20th and 21st century have been intrinsically amoral" rather than "the sugar industry is intrinsically particularly evil (and has been since the 1600s)".
Anoy other greybeards remember this one?
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all...
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
By Gary Taubes July 7, 2002
I blame this book's incendiary title, was a fun read for sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure,_White_and_Deadly
It seems one should not always "trust the science"
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
HFCS is another beast. Everyone needs to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
(2016)
Some other discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962750
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32978590
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183
and on and on...
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733
>Sugar Papers Reveal Industry Role in Shifting National Heart Disease Focus to Saturated Fat
But sugar-sweetened foods contain saturated fat ... so ?
CVD and links to saturated fats is a long, long established phenomenon and has a lot of science behind it. A single study or even studies should not invalidate or discount it. Before people misinterpret what this is saying.
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Those studies however generally put beef and sausages into the same "red meat" category. So yeah... that science is, from what I've seen, basically worthless.
Why would beef and sausages not be in the same category? A large percentage of sausage literally is beef.
Large percentage, yes. The issue is the "not large percentage" part. Sugar, additives, preservatives, colors... all of these are toxic. And when you mix up beef steak with sausage... you won't get realistic results.
That's like asking "what's the issue if somebody salts the soup with cyanide, most of the meal will still be soup". Yeah, but the cyanide will still kill you, even if it is the small percentage.
there are literally thousands of studies. there's no real scientific debate amongst people that know what they are talking about. Red meat, and any food high in saturated fats, are awful for your heart. full stop. that includes sausage, steak, ham, butter, etc.
the people eating "lean steaks" are fooling themselves. There's no such thing as "clean beef" it all has high amounts of bad fats. Are some worse than others? of course but let's not kid ourselves.
There is very little science in nutrition, despite the existence of thousands of studies. There are huge gaps in even the basics of nutrition understanding, and we are constantly discovering new confounding variables. Some dietary fibers were being counted as carbs as late as the 2000s. The huge impacts of the gut microbiome on digestion of food has barely been recognized in the last 10 years, and we still basically know nothing about it. Inter-personal variations in base metabolic rates and/or absorption of nutrients from food is gigantic, with basically no known reasons for it (some of the difference is tied to muscle mass, but even if you eliminate differences in muscle mass, there are still large differences that remain), and no inclusion in common models and dietary recommendations.
I'm not trying to say that red meat is good for you. I'm just saying we have no real idea, and you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot. Try things out, see if you can eat similarly to people you know who are in good health, and get blood work done regularly to see if you're ok. Probably avoid highly synthesized foods.
Says you? because that's not what cardiologists, nutritionists and doctors say. around the world. there's a ton of real, good science from many countries that show a very clear link between increased saturated fat intake, CVD and LDL-C levels. It's not really in question.
You are essentially hand waving away 80+ years of scientific studies and data because...you said so?
> you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot.
This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern.
In any other domain, I would agree with you 100%. But nutrition science really is that bad, in my experience and opinion. With some exceptions (e.g. the need for vitamins to avoid things like scurvy, or the relationship between salt intake and blood pressure), even long-standing nutrition beliefs and practices have been overturned (e.g. consumption of cholesterol, or the discovery of the role of dietary fiber), and some of the newer research is likely to overturn others (e.g. with the role and diversity of gut microbiomes, it's likely other nutrition advice will depend to some extent on your specific microbiome).
The reason for this is fairly simple to see: the methods of science that work so well in other areas of biology are completely impractical in nutrition because of
1. The difficulty of ascertaining and maintaining compliance with a specific diet for a long term study
2. The very long-term effect of some food choices
3. The unknown degree of inter-personal variance in food consumption
4. The expected low effect size of dietary recommendations
5. The huge variety of possible dietary effects
6. The huge amount of possible confounding factors in any population-level study
As you'd expect from this combination, the only effects we really have good science about are those that are relatively fast acting (e.g. salt intake increases BP in less than a day) or have very strong effect sizes (e.g. lack of vitamins or certain amino-acids produces severe diseases). For things like life-long effects, or even effects over multiple years, especially where the correlation is slight, you're left with very unclear science where the unknown possible confounding factors dominate any conclusion.
Edit to add: even today, there is a clear disconnect in nutrition science between people who advocate mostly for relatively simple guidelines and the avoidance of processed foods, usually recommending a preference for vegetables over animal-based products; and the older style of guidelines that you suggest, that say a grilled steak is much worse for you than, say, a stevia-sweetened granola bar you'd buy in a super market.
Dietary cholestrol hasn't really been overturned, but sure there is some nuance. Some people do respond badly to dietary cholestrol (like you said, individual advice is sometimes required), but dietary cholestrol is also not a linear response afaiu. That is, if you eat one egg a day, you may as well eat 4, but if you can completely eliminate dietary cholestrol it could make a difference. So, many guidelines don't bother with suggesting it, because it's too hard to eleminate it to the point of mattering for the average person.
All that to say, the science isn't wrong, but the practicalities influence the advice.
The guidelines haven't changed, but they should be. The association between cholesterol and CVD is specifically related to blood cholesterol levels. However, in healthy individuals, blood cholesterol levels are not strongly impacted by dietary cholesterol choices - since cholesterol is synthesized in the body, there is homeostasis, and higher cholesterol intake leads to lower rate of synthesis, maintaining the same blood levels.
However, some individuals suffer from a bad regulation of this homeostasis, and for them dietary cholesterol does lead to persistent high levels of blood cholesterol as well. So the guidelines should apply for them, but not for everyone else.
Nutrition science is not science in almost any of the ways a real science needs to be, and there is almost zero "real, good science" to be found in it. The reasons this statement is true (as well as the precise qualifications of the exceptions to this) are well laid out by tsimionescu in response to your post.
The measurement, control, confounds, and even basic concepts are atrocious here, this is possibly the only field as bad as or even worse than e.g. social psychology. And this is all ignoring the massive economic interests involved.
It is in fact only science illiteracy that would lead one to think nutrition science is a serious science. At the most absolute charitable, it is a protoscience like alchemy (which did have some replicable findings that eventually led to real chemistry, but which was still mostly nonsense at core).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28442474/ https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/15/1111
Matter of the fact is that the entirety of belief that saturated fat "clogs the arteries" was based on the epidemiological studies which failed to adjust for other risk factors such as trans fat intake, intake of processed foods, and many more.
We should not throw away "80+ years of scientific studies and data" because... said "80+ years of scientific studies and data" do not exist. Not a single actual study had ever been made. The best we have are epidemiological studies, and these have massive issues.
"This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern."
It is not an insane take, you are just being a dumbass. Doctors do not have any training in nutrition. When I asked my doctor - doctors, actually, plural - for dietary advice, literally all of them told me "I don't have knowledge to advise you on that, figure it out on your own".
Science has basis in reality, yes. But doctors aren't scientists.
?
Every health authority mentions both cholesterol/saturated fat and blood sugar as contributing factors.
not sure where people have been for the last year but MAHA and rfk have been on the "fat is good train" and seem to completely ignore entire decades of science.
Fat is good if you eat the right kinds of fats and your consumption of unhealthy fat is limited.
The issue is more that people eat too much fatty food, a specifically unhealthy fats.
On the other hand sugar is probably never good for you and you should aim to reduce it as much as possible.
As a teen I was fooled for a short time, confused about fats, types, etc. But I was a feral child and as ignorant as any animal. It didn't take long to figure things out after I learned to read.
I expect more of government though, and while I see the vague rationale behind hamfisted soda regulations, I remain deeply irked by the Fat Tax that Denmark once imposed. I offer no benefit of doubt and view that thankfully now bygone usurpation of the family table as unforgivable and implemented in full awareness of its flaws.
If one chooses to blame this on corporate influence and ignorance, then either way it exemplifies how easily fundamental aspects of our personal lives can be controlled based on deception.
Ain't sure about anyone else, but I certainly wonder how many other similar delusions we're subject to under such influence and "research'. I know of more than a few.
For me it begs the question of how and why we've allowed such centralized frameworks to persevere. Independent groups do exist, but then there's SEO, mainstream-media and all the other factors that make them practically invisible. And with abandonment of the Internet in favor of corporate friendly LLMs, I expect it to get worse.
"the only people that would care about a funding a study, funded the study! see! that's proof!"
no conflict == no interest
I agree about the need for more transparency and more peer review actually being done
Sugar and fat are the same thing. Converts
There are processes that convert, but it's typically only small amounts. They aren't interchangable in effect.
depends on how fat you already are - if you are, 100% of it converts. For anyone that is addicted to sugar they are pretty much a fat person. The sugar industry is blaming themselves.
That industry can lobby for and basically "purchase" scientific outcomes that affect health standards should be a defcon 1 red alert. People should be lose their careers over this, at the very least imo.
And the fact that people do not care is just as, if not more, concerning.
This is how you get MAHA, which I support bc of this, craziness included.
Er, how does putting your faith in literally vibes (MAHA) follow. Just complete rejection of expertise and science.
Bc that "expertise" was bought and paid for which is why we have a food pyramid that does more harm good.
Yeah, I completely reject nutritional science. Even without bribes involved, there are just too many complexities for them to draw useful conclusions. Ignored the food pyramid too.
You should try the carnivore diet and completely eliminate Vitamin C intake to prove them scientists wrong! Scurvy is just a complex myth, after all. Just like rickets, or blindness from Vitamin A deficiency.
>That industry can lobby for and basically "purchase" scientific outcomes that affect health standards should be a defcon 1 red alert.
why? the state does not need you to live past your retirement age. in fact, it's preferable if you don't.