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What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 11:04 pm
by Gumby
What I'm about to tell you is considered "Quackery."
I recently read an article in Men's Health that showed that the link between saturated fats and heart disease — something we all believe to be fact — has never actually been proven. And the data that has been used to show this link is actually inconclusive and often manipulated.
Men's Health: What If Bad Fat is Actually Good For You?
But, what if I told you that the demonization of saturated fats was carefully constructed by a few lobbyists and politicians as a means to enriched the pharmaceutical industry and synthetic oil industry? Sounds far fetched, right? The following 120-min film that documents how that happened. This may very well have been the biggest fraud in medicine that has ever transpired.
YouTube: The Oiling of America
It turns out that
Dr. Weston Price — who was a dentist a century ago — documented native cultures around the world who exhibited perfect health and perfect dental hygiene. Not only did these cultures have excellent health and excellent teeth, they did not have chronic diseases that plague our modern world (obesity, heart disease, depression, infertility, autism, cancer, etc). But, what they all had in common was a diet with lots of saturated fats. And more than 100 years ago, Americans ate tons of saturated fats — enormous amounts. What Dr. Price began to notice was that as these cultures began to change their eating habits — and start eating less saturated fats and more "prudent" diets that were low in saturated fats and high in refined foods — all sorts of cranial deformities and diseases started to form in these populations. His evidence is rather compelling.
This 5 minute video explains what he and another researcher discovered:
YouTube: The Price-Pottenger Story
Hopefully people will watch these videos
before they criticize them. We are all well aware of the published "dangers" of saturated fats — which have been beaten into our brains by government officials and every medical doctor on the face of the Earth. There is no need to convince most people of those "facts".
But, I ask you to consider... what if they are all wrong? What if the demonization of saturated fats was indeed manufactured by politicians and lobbyists? What if this was all done to sell more pharmaceuticals and synthetic oils? What if we've all been lied to and saturated fats are actually essential to our diet and the health of the human race?
After watching those two videos, it seems clear to me that saturated fats have — up until 100 years ago — always been an essential part of the human diet. And yet, since we've reduced those saturated fats from our diets, we've had a significant rising of chronic diseases that were quite rare before our reduced-fat diets and the use of synthetic oils.
I realize this is all extremely controversial. Hopefully we can have a meaningful discussion about it with open minds — as we usually do here.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 12:20 am
by Reub
There is a lot of good science that shows that it is processed, refined carbohydrates that are the cause of many of the inflammatory diseases that are the bane of modern living, such as heart disease and cancer.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 5:58 am
by craigr
I have come to believe saturated fats are far less of a problem than refined carbs and processed fats.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 6:45 am
by Gumby
Right. Many people now believe that refined carbohydrates are bad for you. That doesn't take much convincing.
But, I'm saying… What if eating lots of saturated fats — as humans did for thousands of years — are essential to our health and well being? What if many of our diseases (both physical and mental) are also due to not having enough natural saturated fats in our diet?
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:17 am
by Gosso
I agree that saturated fat is for the most part harmless, and is a wonderful source of energy (even our bodies store excess energy as saturated fat). Having said that, I don't think we need to go crazy with eating mostly saturated fat. Carbohydrates are still very important to the body, and when consumed in their natural state they can be quite healthy as well.
Here is a blog post from
Whole Health Source on the
Kitavans:
There's a lot to be learned from the Kitava study. Kitavans eat a diet of root vegetables, coconut, fruit, vegetables and fish and have undetectable levels of cardiovascular disease (CVD), stroke and [obesity]. Despite light smoking. 69% of their calories come from carbohydrate, 21% from fat and 10% from protein. This is essentially a carbohydrate-heavy version of what our paleolithic ancestors ate. They also get lots of sunshine and have a moderately high activity level.
Also, not all sugar is the same, here are the conclusions from the blog post called
"Is Sugar Fattening":
Here are the take-home points from this post:
1. Sugar, including fructose, is not inherently fattening relative to other calorie sources, and unrefined sugar is compatible with fat loss in the context of simple whole food diets.
2. Sugar can be fattening in certain contexts, specifically if it is added to foods and beverages to increase their palatability, reward value and energy density.
3. Sugar-sweetened beverages are probably one of the most fattening elements of the modern diet.
4. Fruit is not fattening, and it may actually be slimming.
5. In excess, refined sugar can cause body fat to redistribute from the subcutaneous depot (under the skin, where you want it) to the visceral depots and the liver (where you don't want it). It can also cause insulin resistance in the liver and increase blood pressure, all components of the 'metabolic syndrome'. This is caused specifically by the fructose portion of the sugar.
Here are the implications:
1. Avoiding sugar-sweetened foods, and particularly sugar-sweetened beverages (soda, punch, sweetened coffee, cocktails, maybe fruit juice as well?) can prevent and to some extent reverse fat gain and metabolic dysfunction.
2. I see no reason to believe that refined and unrefined sugars, used in the same context (e.g. muffins baked with white vs. brown sugar), would have different effects on body fatness. However, unrefined sugars may be less harmful to other aspects of health, because they contain other substances that may be protective. Mark Sisson discussed this idea in a recent post on honey (38).
3. Eating fruit does not contribute to fat gain in most people, but instead probably favors leanness. Fruit is a whole food with a low energy density and a moderate palatability and reward value.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:32 am
by Gumby
Right, but let's not overlook that the Kitava post you referenced also said...
The Kitavan diet is low in fat, and most of the fat they eat is saturated because it comes from coconuts. Compared to Americans and Swedes, they have a high intake of saturated fat. So much for the theory that saturated fat causes CVD... They also have a relatively high intake of fish fat, at 4g per day. This gives them a high ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, with plenty of DHA and EPA.
Source:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.ca/20 ... it-up.html
Which is basically what I'm saying. What if the "prudent" diet we've been told to follow — of minimizing saturated fats — is actually causing us harm?
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 9:21 am
by Gosso
Gumby wrote:
Right, but let's not overlook that the Kitava post you referenced also said...
The Kitavan diet is low in fat, and most of the fat they eat is saturated because it comes from coconuts. Compared to Americans and Swedes, they have a high intake of saturated fat. So much for the theory that saturated fat causes CVD... They also have a relatively high intake of fish fat, at 4g per day. This gives them a high ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, with plenty of DHA and EPA.
Source:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.ca/20 ... it-up.html
Which is basically what I'm saying. What if the "prudent" diet we've been told to follow — of minimizing saturated fats — is actually causing us harm?
You're right. I just wanted to point out that just because saturated fat is harmless, doesn't mean that
all carbohydrates are the devil (I'm not suggesting you said this, but a lot of people can easily jump to this conclusion).
Limiting polyunsaturated oils and sugary drinks are the two major rules that I apply to my diet.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 9:36 am
by WiseOne
Interesting thread. It highlights a few of the main problems with evidence based medicine. And please, don't reflexively blame doctors. We're brain-washed from day #1, and most have no better understanding of how to be critical of the medical literature than anyone on this forum does (and possibly less). That's a failure of medical education primarily.
1. Association does not prove causality. i.e., if A and B are noted to occur together, it's not necessarily the case that A causes B, or B causes A. There could easily be an unseen factor C that is causing both A and B. The association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease is a prime example of this type of confusion, but it's not the only one. The idea that vaccines cause autism came from a similar error - at the age that autism first becomes evident, kids are typically in the midst of a crowded immunization schedule. What you get from observing an association is nothing more than a hypothesis that should be tested. In this case, every study that put the hypothesis to the test in a rigorous way came up empty.
2. We don't know all the factors that could be important for understanding a given subject. It may well be that simple sugars and unbalanced omega-3/omega-6 ratios are the key to metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease, but there are probably other dietary elements that we don't know about. Furthermore, they are likely synergistic in ways that we don't understand. In other words, it's dangerous to mess with a dietary system that's worked for tens of thousands of years. Staying away from processed foods, including refined sugar and trans fats, and eating the way your great-grandmother did, is the safest way to go.
3. Anecdotal evidence is worthless. That includes case reports, what happened to your neighbor, etc. You can always find someone who smoked 3 packs a day and lived to the age of 95, but unless you're that person's identical twin, you shouldn't conclude that it's safe to do the same.
The British Medical Journal published a wonderful article in its annual "joke" issue that pointed up yet another fallacy of evidence based medicine: that a study that can't be done for one reason or another doesn't mean that the topic isn't important, or that it's safe to ignore that particular hypothesis. Here's a link to the article, although you can't read the whole thing without a subscription:
http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459.long
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 1:10 pm
by Ad Orientem
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 4:32 pm
by FarmerD
The idea that saturated fat isn't bad for you and may be beneficial has grown from the fringe of health science to the point where it's becoming mainstream.
Uffe Ravnskov was totally villified for writing "The Cholesterol Myth" in 1991. In fact there were demonstrations against him and copies of his book were burned in a bonfire.
Gary Taubes 2002 article in the NY Times "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" perhaps marked the turning point in the saturated fat debate. Taubes was roundly criticised for his article but at least there were no public book burning.
Anhony Colpo's book "The Great Cholesterol Con" completely destroyed the idea saturated fat was bad for you simply by citing and discussing every long term study on the subject. This has become a cult like classic.
Now mainstream publications routinely print articles saying basically the same thing Ravnskov did 20 years ago even though all the evidence has been there all along.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 5:12 pm
by FarmerD
In case anyone wants to read the medical/dietary opinions of some well known low carb diet experts, primal diet experts, medical researchers, and cardiologists, here's a few sites I have bookmarked.
This site features lots of podcast with some well known health experts (mostly low carb) including Dr William Davis (Wheatbelly) Dr Briffa, Uffe Ravnskov, Sally Fallon (Weston Price Foundation, etc)
http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.com/
Steve Guyenet is a PhD in Neurobiology and has a great blog
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/
Dr Eades is a well known low carb doctor
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/
This is the Dr Bernstein diabetes forum. What the crawling Road forum is to investing, this is the forum for diabetes, cardiology, and general health. Lots of medical specialists post their analysis of medical studies here along with a lot of veterinarians, scientists, engineers, amateur medical researchers (i.e. higher IQ people). I’d stack up their recommendations/analysis against any mainstream website. You do have to register for the forum but it’s free.
http://www.diabetes-book.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
Life Extension magazine is a great read on the latest medical studies relating to diet and health.
http://www.lef.org/protocols/?fc=2#magazine-menu
Cardiologist Dr William Davis’s website. The great thing here is Dr Davis practices preventive cardiology. He cites lots of studies but also has a lot of practical experience seeing what really helps patients.
http://blog.trackyourplaque.com/
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 7:04 pm
by TripleB
The problem is primarily one of living a sedentary lifestyle. If you sit at a desk for 60 hours a week, you're going to have heart disease and be obese regardless of what you eat.
Conversely, if you move around for 10 hours per day, it doesn't matter what you eat, you will not become obese, get diabetes, or have a heart attack.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 7:31 pm
by Xan
Actually, it's primarily a matter of how many carbohydrates, especially highly-refined, you eat. Exercise does not lead to weight loss. It's good for you for a number of reasons, but weight loss isn't one of them.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 7:54 pm
by FarmerD
TripleB wrote:
The problem is primarily one of living a sedentary lifestyle. If you sit at a desk for 60 hours a week, you're going to have heart disease and be obese regardless of what you eat.
Conversely, if you move around for 10 hours per day, it doesn't matter what you eat, you will not become obese, get diabetes, or have a heart attack.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Exercise is certainly a good thing for one's health but it's not a cure all. Your diet is just as important. I was diagnosed as a diabetic after returning from a deployment to the middle east. All military people do physical training (PT) everyday (and there are weight standards) but I was extra active when deployed - I ran 4 miles per day every day for 6 months plus I lifted weights.
If daily exercise by itself prevents heart attacks/diabetes etc., no farmer would ever get sick. On the other hand, I know a lot of 90 year ladies who have never exercised a day in their lives.
Moderate exercise, a balanced whole food diet, good sleep habits, a good social network, avoidance of bad habits (smoking, drugs) along with having good genes are all keys to good health.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:06 pm
by FarmerD
Gumby wrote:
Right. Many people now believe that refined carbohydrates are bad for you. That doesn't take much convincing.
But, I'm saying… What if eating lots of saturated fats — as humans did for thousands of years — are essential to our health and well being? What if many of our diseases (both physical and mental) are also due to not having enough natural saturated fats in our diet?
The medical establishment will never admit this but the surest way to raise your HDL cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol) is to eat more saturated fat. If you look at studies that compare the effects of different kinds of fats on your cholesterol profile, researchers always state in the abstract of the study that monosaturated fats (like olive oil) are the best fat you can eat because it raises HDL. But when you read the actual study data, saturated fat raises HDL far more than monosaturated fat. Study after study shows the same result and researchers always reach the same odd conclusion.
High HDL levels are strongly associated with low cancer and heart attack rates. Some research indicates your HDL level is a good indicator of how strong your immume system is.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:09 pm
by Ad Orientem
Thanks Farmer for that. You beat me to the point. Exercise is super important. But there are a lot of factors that contribute to poor health. My uncle Dean worked 6-7 days a week for most of his life as a farmer. But he also chain smoked, drank beer like water and couldn't pass up on a plate of fried anything. One afternoon almost 20 years ago he climbed on his tractor put the key in and before he turned it just keeled right off. He was probably dead before he hit the ground. I think he was in his mid 50's. He was a great guy and the life of any party. I miss him still.
Memory eternal.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 12:20 pm
by Gosso
The downside to saturated fat, is that if you combine it with refined sugar then you get a highly rewarding food (ie triggers massive amounts of dopamine to be released). So saturated fat in this sense will lead to problems and likely weight gain.
However, if you pair it with unrefined starches, like potatoes or rice, then you get a much better tasting food, yet isn't overpowering.
Another potential problem with saturated fat is consuming too much of it, so that it displaces carbohydrates. Apparently this can lead to problems with the thyroid and reduce the amount of circulating T3. The solution is to consume more carbs. Anthony Colpo discusses this
HERE. Also Paul Jaminet discusses it
HERE.
WiseOne, you might like the thread where we blame doctors for all our health problems (jk

)
http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/ht ... ic.php?t=7
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 2:19 pm
by MachineGhost
Gumby wrote:
I realize this is all extremely controversial. Hopefully we can have a meaningful discussion about it with open minds — as we usually do here.
It's only controversial to those with economic interests at stake.
The reality is different than the very biased Price Foundation would like to paint it. Pottinger's cats didn't thrive on raw milk and die on pasteurized, they died from tyrosine defenciency which wasn't present in pastuerized milk. Original Eskimos are genetically adapted to eat their high fat diet. Yet they also suffer and die from from diseases caused by excess Omega-3 intake. Put them on the S.A.D. along with other non-Western cultures, and they immediately develop diabetes, etc. as they are not genetically adapted to processing such refined carbohydrates.
There are a couple of key moments to the fat issue:
1920's: Partially-hydrogenated trans fats introduced to compete with butter.
1950's: Large numbers of men dropping dead at 50 of heart disease. Autopsies of arterial plaque indicated saturated fat, so peer-reviewed studies starting confirming the correlation.
1970's: Introduction of high fructose corn syrup.
1982: Introduction of cholesterol lowering drugs.
1984: Demonization of
all fats in favor of carbs by Agricultural Dept Food Pyramid.
1989: Demonization of
saturated fats by Center of Science for Public Interest (CSPI), to be replaced by partially-hydrogenated, vegetable oils (Omega-6). I believe they sued the fast food industry. This is why fast food is largely tasteless now compared to when they were using beef tallow to fry french fries, etc.
2007: Cessation of trans-fat oils originally brought about by CSPI's 1989 actions. They really should have been sued big time.
Satured fats, as Omega-6's, are highly inflammatory and contain arachidonic acid, so they are not healthy per se, but they are necessary IN MODERATION (10% of calories)
balanced off with unrefined Omega-3's. Unrefined Omega-9 is virtually neutral, but the nonfat components have many health promoting benefits.
There's over 20
independent risk factors that contribute to heart disease. There is no one target cure or one target cause. Anyone that says otherwise is just trying to make money off of you or promote an ideaology.
MG
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 2:55 pm
by Gumby
MachineGhost wrote:Satured fats, as Omega-6's, are highly inflammatory and contain arachidonic acid, so they are not healthy per se, but they are necessary IN MODERATION (10% of calories) balanced off with unrefined Omega-3's.
WAPF responds by saying...
MYTH: ARACHIDONIC ACID IS A "BAD FAT"
The second myth is that animal fats promote inflammation because they contain a small amount of the omega-6 PUFA arachidonic acid, found primarily in liver and egg yolks with smaller amounts in butter and meat fats. This hypothesis emerged in the scientific literature in the 1980s and 1990s as researchers began attributing the low rate of heart disease among traditional Inuit to their consumption of large amounts of omega-3 fatty acids from marine oils.24 Researchers argued that these omega-3 fatty acids were protective precisely because they counteracted the inflammatory effects of arachidonic acid. Barry Sears popularized this idea in his best-selling 1995 book The Zone Diet.25 Therein, he proclaimed excess arachidonic acid “your worst biological nightmare.”? Not only is it inflammatory, he wrote, but it “is so potent and so dangerous that when you inject it into the bloodstream of rabbits the animals die within three minutes.”?
Despite these sensational claims, arachidonic acid is not inherently inflammatory. Its deficiency, in fact, produces a number of inflammatory symptoms, including dandruff, hair loss, infertility and irritated, red, sore, swollen, and scaly skin.26,27 Inhibiting supposedly “inflammatory”? products made from arachidonic acid such as prostaglandin E2 using over-the-counter nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) can produce a number of inflammatory outcomes. These drugs induce intestinal pathologies that closely resemble celiac disease in laboratory animals in response to gluten or even egg white,28,29 and they interfere with the resolution of autoimmune conditions.30
Although it is true that our bodies use arachidonic acid to initiate inflammation—a vital process if we want to survive to adulthood without being wiped out by pathogenic microbes —our bodies also use this fatty acid to suppress inflammation or to resolve inflammation once it has run its course. We use arachidonic acid to make cell-to-cell junctions that form physical barriers against toxins and pathogens,31-33 to create a unique environment in the gut that causes our immune system to react to food proteins with tolerance instead of intolerance,34 and to make important molecules called lipoxins that help resolve existing inflammation.30,35 We even use arachidonic acid to signal the conversion of omega-3 fatty acids to resolvins, another class of molecules that help resolve inflammation.30 It makes little sense to characterize this fatty acid as singularly inflammatory in nature when it has so many anti-inflammatory functions, and when it is present in so many traditional foods consumed by populations free of inflammatory diseases.
24. Mann NJ, et al. Arachidonic Acid Content of the Australian Diet Is Lower than Previously Estimated. J Nutr. 1995;125:2528-35.
25. Sears B. The Zone Diet. HarperCollins, 1995.
26. Burr GO, Burr MM. A New Deficiency Disease Produced by the Rigid Exclusion of Fat From the Diet. J Biol Chem. 1929;LXXXII(2):345-67.
27. Turpeinen O. Further Studies on the Unsaturated Fatty Acids Essential in Nutrition. J Nutr. 1938;15(4):351-66.
28. Newberry RD, Stenson WF, Lorenz RG. Cyclooxygenase-2-dependent arachidonic acid metabolites are essential modulators of the intestinal immune response to dietary antigen. Nat Med. 1999;5(8 ):900-6
29. D'Arienzo R, Stefanile R, Maurano F, Luongo D, Bergamo P, Mazzarella G, Troncone R, Auricchio S, David C, Rossi M. A deregulated immune response to gliadin causes a decreased villus height in DQ8 transgenic mice. Eur J Immunol. 2009;39(12):3552-61.
30. Chan MM, Moore AR. Resolution of Inflammation in Murine Autoimmune Arthritis Is Disrupted by Cyclooxygenase-2 Inhibition and Restored by Prostaglandin E2-Mediated Lipoxin A4 Production. J Immunol. 2010;184(11):6418-6426.
31. Agrawal R, Daniel EE. Control of gap junction formation in canine trachea by arachidonic acid metabolites. Am J Physiol. Mar 1986;250(3 Pt 1):C495-505.
32. Civitelli R, Ziambaras K, Warlow PM, et al. Regulation of connexin43 expression and function by prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and parathyroid hormone (PTH) in osteoblastic cells. J Cell Biochem. Jan 1 1998;68(1):8-21.
33. Blikslager AT, Roberts MC, Rhoads JM, Argenzio RA. Prostaglandins I2 and E2 have a synergistic role in rescuing epithelial barrier function in porcine ileum. J Clin Invest. Oct 15 1997; 100(8 ):1928-1933
34. du Pre MF, Samson JN. Adaptive T-cell responses regulating oral tolerance to protein antigen. Allergy. 2011;66(4):478-90.
35. Banneberg G, Serhan CN. Specialized pro-resolving lipid mediators in the inflammatory response: An update. Biochim Biopys Acta. 2010; 1801(12):1260-73.
Source:
http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-f ... om-fiction
Which seems to suggest that nobody has proven anything terribly bad about Arachidonic Acid and saturated fat.
All I know is that cultures, all over the world were eating high levels of saturated fat for thousands of years and did just fine.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 8:22 pm
by WildAboutHarry
This is obviously a highly charged issue. Some observations:
1950s heart disease rate probably linked to incredible rates of smoking, combined with the rise of artificial oils/lards (safflower, crisco, et al.) in lieu of the real thing.
The 1970s McGovern committee report condemning fats was (if I recall correctly) written by a young staffer with no medical or dietary background.
The biochemical pathways of fat and carbohydrate metabolism in humans show that the latter contribute to high serum triglyceride levels, high small particle LDL levels, etc. Carbohydrate consumption, especially of easily hydrolyzed glucose/fructose products leads to spikes in insulin levels, fat storage, etc.
And, speaking from the male perspective, cholesterol is a precursor of testosterone, the most important hormone on the planet

Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 9:14 pm
by WiseOne
Gosso, thanks for the link to that thread about blaming doctors. Sorry Medium Tex, but there's nothing in that post I haven't heard a million times before. I'll just say this: please don't shoot the messenger.
Realize that the vast majority of doctors do not engage in research, nor do they spend hours every day combing through the literature. They take CME courses online or at conferences where they get it all fed in as "sound bites", and if they don't feed it back correctly the answers get marked wrong. You'd be amazed at how much being an MD is like being in 3rd grade. No, the ones to blame here are the FDA, the McGovern committee, and related groups that synthesized the saturated-fat story out of a collection of not quite relevant studies.
Let me illustrate. A few years ago, someone at the FDA got a bright idea to look back through the clinical trials of the new generation antidepressants. When those drugs are trialed, the people volunteering to take them are asked about side effects. If the answer is "yes I had side effects", they are then asked to check off which ones they experienced. One of the items on the list is "suicidal ideation".
It turned out that a disproportionately large number of subjects taking the drug reported suicidal ideation, compared to placebo. So the FDA promptly published a rather famous article reporting that SSRIs increased the risk of suicide especially for teens. They also put a black box warning on the SSRIs that legally bound any prescriber to tell the patient about the suicide risk. The inevitable result is that many patients, particularly teens, immediately went off the drugs, and the teen suicide rate increased sharply (doubled I think but I can't remember exactly).
What went wrong? It was the way that the side effects were catalogued in the trials. The real drug will of course have a higher rate of side effects of all kinds than placebo, so a person taking the drug will be more likely to say yes. Which means that they then have a greater opportunity than the placebo group to check off "suicidal ideation". Of such things are great results made.
This kind of thing goes on all the time. Medical myths come mainly from sloppy scholarship like this, not from sinister plots. Though no doubt once an idea is out there, people who stand to benefit will try to promote it. That goes for most of those internet sites that have been quoted, by the way.
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Tue May 01, 2012 10:10 am
by Gosso
WiseOne,
(Edit: Upon rereading this post the first paragraph seems to come off as harsh which was not my intent since I agree with what WiseOne is saying. It was more directed towards the diet bloggers out there, although there are a few of them that keep an open mind.)
My interest in diet/nutrition has led me to the conclusion that the majority of doctors/researchers/bloggers don't have the slightest clue when it comes to our health. It seems they grab on to a single idea and run with it. They will cherry pick research papers from pubmed and ignore everything else. They then try to over-complicate something that in reality is really quite simple -- eat real/whole food and move on with your life.
I agree with your comment "eat what your grandmother ate". Of course we can clean it up a little bit more by eliminating any transfat.
I also agree with FarmerD's comment regarding diet being important but not necessarily more important than other lifestyle habits. I do like to look at the diet of "primitive" cultures and how they live, but I cannot be sure if their good health is the result of diet, stress (ie. acute vs chronic), spirituality, social network, moderate exercise, being constantly in nature, etc. It also could be that natural selection would be much stronger in a primitive culture, meaning only the strong and best adapted to that environment would survive. Whereas in our modern culture the need to be strong and healthy is not required, but rather an option (having good genes will also help).
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Tue May 01, 2012 11:46 am
by Gumby
Gosso wrote:I agree with your comment "eat what your grandmother ate". Of course we can clean it up a little bit more by eliminating any transfat.
Gosso... What WiseOne actually said was:
WiseOne wrote:Staying away from processed foods, including refined sugar and trans fats, and eating the way your great-grandmother did, is the safest way to go.
She said
great-grandmother, not grandmother. Your great grandmother probably didn't eat trans fats because trans fats are extremely rare in nature.
From Wikipedia:
If you've ever seen a cook book from the late 1800s, it's shocking how much cream, butter, fat drippings, egg yolks, whole milk, etc were in nearly all of the recipes. But, that's what people ate...
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Source: http://archive.org/stream/baptistladies ... 2/mode/2up[/align]
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Tue May 01, 2012 12:55 pm
by Gosso
Gumby wrote:
Gosso wrote:I agree with your comment "eat what your grandmother ate". Of course we can clean it up a little bit more by eliminating any transfat.
Gosso... What WiseOne actually said was:
WiseOne wrote:Staying away from processed foods, including refined sugar and trans fats, and eating the way your great-grandmother did, is the safest way to go.
She said "great-grandmother," not grandmother. Your great grandmother probably didn't eat trans fats because trans fats are extremely rare in nature.
From Wikipedia:
If you've ever seen a cook book from the late 1800s, it's shocking how much cream, butter, fat drippings, egg yolks, whole milk, etc were in nearly all of the recipes. But, that's what people ate...
Opps

I need to be less lazy and use the "insert quote". But still, my great-grandmother lived until ~1990, so she would have lived right through the worst of the trans-fat era. According to the
Wikipedia link trans fat was introduced in ~1910, and they didn't figure out that trans-fat was horrible until the early 1990's.
Studies in the early 1990s, however, brought renewed scrutiny and confirmation of the negative health impact of trans fats. In 1994, it was estimated that trans fats caused 20,000 deaths annually in the US from heart disease.[20]
But I think we can agree that a "pre-1910 diet" is what we're talking about, where they were not shy about adding saturated fat to meals.
Also, that 1800's cookbook has some delicious looking recipes!
Re: What If Saturated Fats Are Essential?
Posted: Tue May 01, 2012 1:08 pm
by Gumby
Gosso wrote:But I think we can agree that a "pre-1910 diet" is what we're talking about, where they were not shy about adding saturated fat to meals.
Right. Yes, exactly.
Gosso wrote:Also, that 1800's cookbook has some delicious looking recipes!
I know! That's what I'm talking about. People were practically drinking bacon fat and cream three times a day.