The context of the early 70s was that "The Limits To Growth" and "The Population Bomb" had just been published and there was a real concern in the air that the world was going to run out of food quickly unless something drastic was done. I think this created a strong confirmation bias that favored any scientific validation of vegetarianism as good news. Saturated fat being the main component of meats that is not in vegetables, and carbohydrates being the main components of vegetables that are not in meats, the confirmation bias was decidedly pro-carbohydrates, anti-saturated fats.
IMHO, whenever you get people saying "Wouldn't it be wonderful if the science said <x> because it would help with <some other thing that is hard to figure out>" you get one of these situations.
Of course on the other hand: wouldn't it be amazingly convenient for the meat industry if just as a massive drought was bringing forth a renewed wave of criticism against the wastefulness of alfalfa for feed; with factory farms being heavily criticized as horrifying cruel; antibiotics in animal feed being blamed for bringing about the MRSApocalypse; hormones being blamed for... well just about anything; along with shit lagoons destroying the environment and cowfarts destroying the ozone layer there was a sudden rush of studies showing that you should be eating more meat.
I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing.
Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.
It's not a question of 'is meat bad for the planet'. It's that the internet seems to be full of people who fancy themselves sharp-minded critical-thinking skeptics running around accusing Big-Ag of motivated reasoning with regards to carbohydrates while ignoring that meat production is part of Big-Ag and has just as much cause for motivated reasoning.
Yeah, fair enough. Honestly any single study is also just goddamn meaningless -- it's really impossible to draw any conclusions from most any study without the context of the rest of the field to judge the quality and implications of a particular paper. Pushing a single study is usually either disingenuous (on the part of anyone with financial interest) or irresponsible (on the part of media/blogger sensationalists).
I personally find it more amusing that the internet is so friendly towards "big organic". :-)
Err, in this hypothetical, wouldn't that be the case for vegetables as well? Some vegetables would not be as efficient to grow as the most efficient meats, thus you would want to focus on the efficient vegetables...etc
Fresh vegetables are typically only labelled by society as 'fresh vegetables' because they're so calorie-poor you'd need a fridge full of the stuff every day to feed someone enough calories that they don't lose weight. Efficient calories don't often get called 'vegetables', but some sort of essential staple food. Vegetables average around 100 calories per pound: http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/cal-par/calorie-paradox1...
.
Calories we can produce really, really well with various techniques:
It's almost certainly true for some vegetables, but I'm not sure any of those crops account for a majority of a vegetarian diet. Soybean, corn, potatoes, rice and wheat are like, really awesome.
But "let's not use any animal products at all" is a much harder sell. "Hey, if you eat mostly chicken and pork with just the occasional steak or burger on a special occasion you can get like 50%+ of the environmental benefits" is a much more plausible way forward for the US.
"Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce"
Citation needed.
Beef can live on range-lands that aren't good for much else and requires very low inputs. If we didn't have a taste for grain fed finished animals it would almost certainly be many times as efficient as pork.
That is an excellent point: while pork is more efficient on a per-calorie basis and a per-acre usage (because you can pack pigs into a factory and feed them corn & soy beans, two of the most space-efficient crops), you can't discount that land is not fungible.
There definitely is land that is only useful (agriculturally) for grazing. There will be a subset of this land for which the tradeoffs favor grazing (there may be some land we could technically graze but as a society prefer not to, eg, to conserve water resources or leave an area "wild"), and there's no reason to not produce beef just because it's inefficient in other contexts.
Pork also has a niche like that -- you can feed pigs food waste. Some food waste can simply be eliminated and you always have the option to just compost food waste, but there is a non-negligible amount of necessary food waste (slightly spoiled produce, table scraps, etc). If you could efficiently funnel all of this food waste into pork production, you could reclaim those calories.
Thanks for this. This seems very plausable. I'm now eating low carb and shuning most vetegable oils. I do use Olive Oil and eat more fish. I use just a little coconut oil. Lost ~28 lbs and have not been sick at all since going ketonic. Still have to lose more weight. I do eat red meat and chicken, turkey. Cheese is a favorite and my bias is I don't want to have to give up cheese.
I remember reading that cheese (and dairy products) are actually relatively addictive, apparently because of casein. Here's a link, but it's not the original study just an article about it. I'm sure a google search for "casein yale food addiction study" might turn up better results.
That's correct. Cheese has a really high concentration of the casein protein which breaks down into casomorphins in the gut which then act like an opioid. Cheese is also very high in advanced glycation end products (AGEs) which are known to cause aging.
That being said, I wonder if a worthwhile goal is to breed plants, especially grains, to have higher fat (and specifically higher omega-3 fat) and lower carbohydrate contents. Long term storage might be an issue since unsaturated fats tend to oxidize while carbohydrates are stable, but if it's possible for the fat to be mostly saturated that wouldn't be an issue.
Vegetarian diet isn't really connected to low-fat. Meat generally decreases your food's average fat content, since most meat is lean. Vegetarians make up lack of lean meat with more fatty dairy and cholesterol raising eggs.
There are also non-vegan vegetarians who eat a lot of vegan food, or are health or environmental conscious so they minimize egg/dairy while not cutting it out completely.
The subject of the article says as much about the politics of science as it is a comment on the science itself. To the extent the findings have been ignored, or perhaps even shunned, is not at all unique. Many important advances in medicine had a notoriously difficult time being accepted, as an example, the idea that bacterial infection was the cause of stomach ulcers had been around for decades before gaining traction.
I think the substance of the science discussed revolves around the composition of dietary fat. As the article notes, the recommendation for increasing the proportion of "polyunsaturated" oils is likely a major factor. Indeed, common vegetable oils contain a high proportion of linoleic acid, the "base" omega-6 dietary source. It has been shown in numerous studies that the omega-6 (N-6) to omega-3 (N-3) ratio is important since these essential fats are linked to immune system functioning.
N-6 fatty acids are associated with pro-inflammatory factors, N-3 primarily leads to anti-inflammatory products. In the archaic/traditional diet, N-6 and N-3 were present in roughly equal proportion, but with marked increase in vegetable oil consumption, N-6 to N-3 becomes "imbalanced", e.g., 10:1.
Inflammatory processes are well-known to play a role in cardiovascular disease, so it's not hard to see how increased N-6 fatty acid intake is a contributor. However this info has not been a secret in the fields of obesity and metabolic disease treatment and research, where the impact of dietary fat intake has been discussed and published for more than 20 years.
Since the mid-90's I've recommended sharply reducing polyunsaturated vegetable oil intake as part of "lifestyle" changes supporting optimum health, particularly for patients with predisposition to metabolic disease. FWIW I've followed my own advice for at least as long, the results have impressed my internist who jokes that I've become quite an uninteresting case.
(Don't have references at hand. If anyone wants I'll post them.)
Here are a few references. These are recent open access articles covering the topic fairly broadly. Tons more out there, it's a big and important area of research.
Tani S1, Takahashi A, Nagao K, Hirayama A, Association of Fish Consumption-Derived Ratio of Serum n-3 to n-6 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Cardiovascular Risk With the Prevalence of Coronary Artery Disease.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25902881
Khan SA, Ali A, Khan SA, Zahran SA, Damanhouri G, Azhar E, Qadri I, Unraveling the complex relationship triad between lipids, obesity, and inflammation.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25258478
Canola oil was bred to have a 1:1 ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3. It's low in saturated fat too.
For all the good things people say about the fat composition of olive oil, canola oil is probably better. It also has a more neutral taste. It's all refined though, and a GMO, things which some people don't like.
The problem with Canola oil is largely due to the processing techniques (cold pressed Canola doesn't really exist), and the fact that it DOES have such a high amount of Omega 6 causes it to promote inflammation.
Anti-inflammatory diets is about the only way to survive into old age regularly, in both the length of life, and the quality of life aspects.
I am not a dietary scientist, but we are using either coconut fat or grape see oil for cooking.
The main reason is that these are supposed to produce less cancerogenic compounds after high temperature treatment* and they also do not leave any strong specific taste.
Both do not contain significant amount of omega-3 fatty acids, but the cooking oil probably also should not be your main source of fatty acids anyway (usually we wipe the products clean after cooking).
Perhaps somebody else could give better insight into it.
Some people like olive oil and it does do better than vegetable oil.
If your goal is to minimize aldehydes produced in cooking coconut oil is maybe best but can affect the taste. Lard and goose far are good alternatives that for some foods can provide a better taste.
If you are concerned about flash point, make sure it is clarified butter (Ghee). Normal butter still has a decent amount of milk that will easily burn at lower temperatures.
What are you cooking? I mean, are we talking pan frying or deep frying?
My understanding is that peanut oil is very pro inflammatory and a bad idea to use at high heat. Butter, animal fats and coconut oil are my go to oils. But I don't deep fry.
Both involve high temperatures, so they would call for similar kinds of fats or oils. Peanut oil stands up well to high temperatures and does well in both situations. Peanut oil isn't pro-inflammatory; in fact, due to its higher saturated fat content and lower unsaturated fat content it's more like coconut oil and animal fats in that regard.
Why not refined olive oil? As I understand it olive oil is almost entirely monounsaturated which is supposed to be the "good" fat, and when refined it has minimal flavor and a higher smoke point.
You are right, better to have said bacterial infection is a cause of ulcers. Actually infection instigates around 2/3 of ulcer cases. Other contributing factors include NSAIDs (like ibuprofen), stress, and certain endocrine conditions or tumors. Working out diagnosis and treatment can be complicated, so having a handle on your condition is a good thing.
The article stops short of highlighting the most explosive detail. The study’s investigators suppressed these data just as one of them, Ancel Keys, was consolidating political power and unifying opinion around his cholesterol hypothesis. And when, twenty years later, the contradictory results were published, they lied about the conclusions.
There has always been suspicion of knowing cherry-picking. But the evidence of fraud, by the central figure of saturated fat phobia, is much clearer now.
This article leaves out or does not stress enough some important information:
_How long was the experiment conducted for?
_How many people have been monitored after the experiment?
_Did the people go back to the previous diet, once the experiment was over?
To the first question, one can find hidden in the article: "Willett faulted the experiment because many of the patients were on the special diets for relatively brief periods - many were being released from the mental institutions. But about a quarter of the patients remained on the diet for a year or longer".
If people stayed on this diet for a year or so max of their 65+ years of life, this data seems utterly non-relevant to support either thesis. It is fundamental to know if the people (and how many) continued with the new diet for a sizable portion of their life. In any case the results should at least not include people that have been on the diet for just a couple of months.
It is hard to believe that a diet of low fat for just a random year in somebody's life (~1.5% of life span) would make a big difference against the remaining 98% of life spent eating fat. The question whether a low fat diet is better than a high fat one is very intriguing, but this data, as presented in the article, seem inconclusive.
>It is hard to believe that a diet of low fat for just a random year in somebody's life (~1.5% of life span) would make a big difference against the remaining 98% of life spent eating fat. //
It's not inconceivable though: I've friends who have lactose intolerance who once they have stayed off lactose for a while can then consume it relatively normally so long as they maintain a relatively low dose.
It seems possible that the body could "clean" itself during a period of low fat dieting sufficient that it can handle a normal Western diet for the rest of a normal Western life-span? If a mechanism for fat storing that was detrimental was related to one's age when the fat was deposited that might also explain how a short period of dieting would be beneficial over a lifetime.
Most everything [I've read] in dietary science seems inconclusive.
To me, the problem is not scientific studies, but mainstream reporting of scientific studies that turn into popular fads and trends. Science doesn't deal in absolutes, but society does. This is true for dietary fat, autism, gluten, paleo, salt, etc.
I think you give "science" too much credit. "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and all that. In an abstract sense, yes, everything in science is subject to criticism and reevaluation. But in a human sense, entire fields are dominated for decades by strong personalities whose theories aren't necessarily stronger but have greater social support. I present to you Noam Chomsky re: linguistics as a prime example.
Surely I oversimplify, but I think it's important to acknowledge the human factor in what passes as scientific consensus in a field at any given time.
Dominate theories are not necessarily accepted as consensus. It can be hard to notice outside of the field but Noam Chomsky had far less support inside linguistics than you might think.
It's a classic case where it's hard to pickup most people saying 'I have no idea', when there is a lot of talk about theory x.
PS: The counter argument was simply children get feedback while learning a language. Mute children have a much harder time picking up their native language so it's not a passive process.
Actually this just reads like scientists being blind to their own biases. One of the guys heading the original study was Ancel Keys, the father of the lipid hypothesis.
I'm quite surprised that large clinical studies funded by the government didn't require publication of the dataset within some window after the experiment completed. It seems that the new trend of preregistering clinical trials and recording hypotheses up front is only now starting to catch on.
The solution is not specific to this study. It's explaining that there are no absolutes and rather presenting the results with probabilities. For example, making it clear that research has shown that it is probable that it might make you healthier but is not guaranteed, based on x number of studies in the last x years.
Was the mainstream reporting responsible for the scientists that wanted the food pyramid plastered in every classroom? Or for all the scientists who refused to use their positions to say anything to the effect of, "our confidence in that model isn't high enough to turn it into textbook advice yet"?
Mainstream reports it that way because the general public has no appetite for the intricate details of scientific studies. The vast majority of people tend to look for quick fixes and easy changes, which is why they gravitate towards reporting that oversimplify scientific findings. And since the media wants/needs readers/clicks to stay in business...
i think it's mostly that most scientific studies have no clear outcomes, people want resolutions not "we did this study, it wasn't perfect but the findings seemed to point towards this effect and more better studies should be done in this area to back up this before we can say it probably does cause this effect" is not anything anyone who isn't a scientist would care about, especially since those further studies will very likely not happen
"Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints, by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences."[1]
Mental patients didn't have a say on their diet 40 years ago. This experiment says a lot about the level of care for the wellbeing of those who are locked up and are not given a choice (supposedly for their own benefit). I wonder if these kinds of experiments are still being done at mental institutions and elsewhere people are treated like Guinea pigs.
This was my first thought as well. You couldn't possibly do a study like this today, or at least I hope not, because the issues around informed consent are too thorny when it comes to mental patients.
The nearly-unbelievable rigor of astrophysics and particle physics grants too much credibility to dietary and nutrition studies. Until a satisfactory level of rigor is established, these efforts will remain equal in validity to any other nutrition advertisement.
I'm not sure what point (if any) gwern is making here but, e.g., Ancel Keys died in 2004 at the age of 100. So, indeed, no wonder he's deceased: he would have had to be staggeringly old to still be alive now.
[EDITED to add:] On the face of it, the most obvious reading of gwern's comment is (it seems to me) something like "ha ha, of course they're dead, because they had stupid theories about diet and health so we should expect them to have died by now". If that is what gwern meant, then I think he was being unreasonable. (But I'm not at all sure it is.)
I totally read it as "oh, no wonder it 'was never fully published' before now, since the lead investigators were the infamous Ancel Keys and a now-deceased collaborator."
Well also, as pointed out elsewhere, Keys championed reduction in saturated fats, etc. to prevent heart disease. If the results of a trial he conducted disputed that idea, that might have harmed his reputation.
I read it as a joke about the fact that the study is so old they're almost certainly dead (coming from a 21yo 40 years seems like a long time so that could be why I read it differently?)
I read it as a reference to the old idea that "science progresses one funeral at a time". That the information was suppressed because it didn't go along with their opinions, and had to wait until now to come out.
Dr Mark Hyman, an MD who practises functional medicine, recently launched abook titled 'Eat Fat Get Thin'. Today I received an email from him titled 'The results are in...' :
Dear Marcus,
Before I launch any program, I test it.
Not just on my patients, which I have done for decades (in fact on over 20,000 patients), but on people all over the country following the program at home. We had over 1,000 people do the Eat Fat, Get Thin beta program and the results and stories were amazing.
Here are the average results from the first group to go through the program:
Weight Loss: 7.1 pounds (some lost up to 46 pounds)
Waist Reduction: 1.9 inches (some lost up to 13 inches)
Hip Reduction: 1.7 inches (some lost up to 16 inches)
Blood Pressure Reduction: systolic (top number) 9 points, diastolic (bottom number) 4.5 points
Blood Sugar Reduction: 23 points
Participants also reported an astounding 69% drop in ALL symptoms from all diseases. If you’re ready to lose extra pounds… have more energy… and start feeling amazing click here to join the Eat Fat, Get Thin Challenge.
I am following the work of Dr Hyman for a long time and already knew that a diet with good fats is healthy, but the result of 69% drop of symtoms of all diseases is astonishing and makes you think: the bad foods make you sick and the good foods make you healthy.
The worst part is that for 20 years (until about 10-15 years ago), anyone stating that maybe saturated fat wasn't so bad was demonized and called anti-science. There seemed to be very little opportunity for reasoned discussion or actual comparison of results in the wild. Demonization of the opposing viewpoint, instead of reasoned discussion and further inquiry, IS the definition of anti-science.
This headline sounds really interesting. But if you think about it more you find that this is true for a lot of papers. I guess there are quite a few papers that never make it to being published, because it's hard work and the competition is tough. And each one of these might have had an impact if it had succeeded in getting published.
I had the understanding that individual genetics control response to dietary fats. I never see individual genetics referred to with these diet instructions and studies - which makes me very vary of them. Am I completely wrong (i.e. did my 23 and me test give unscientific advice)?
This is a case where I'm inclined not to blame the Americans. The modal human eats a more or less traditional diet that coevolved with them over a very long period. Unsurprisingly, Japanese in Japan do pretty well on their diet, Greeks in Greece do pretty well (though not as well) on theirs, and so forth. Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American diet is a pretty recent phenomenon and hasn't settled.
The quest for the one perfect diet which is optimally healthy for everyone in the world, though, is obviously misguided.
> The quest for the one perfect diet which is optimally healthy for everyone in the world, though, is obviously misguided.
I'm not talking about what the country eats but more on a personal level. At my workplace everyone eats meat and most of them eat junk food but I am vegetarian and I look after what I eat.
I don't wanna sound like a hippie, but just listen to your body and be conscious of what it likes and how you feel after eating certain kind of foods.
Personally speaking, after eating junk food I feel like shit. Voila!
>Japanese in the US show pathologies like obesity at elevated levels compared to the ones in Japan. The American diet is a pretty recent phenomenon and hasn't settled. //
Are countries with a higher degree of capitalism in general or a greater profit motive in their food production more likely to have diet that leads to poor outcomes?
You know, Japan itself is ranked 22nd in the Heritage index of economic freedom ("degree of capitalism") for 2016.
And a raw country-to-country comparison of health outcomes will be badly confounded by the effect of race. Japanese in the US perform worse on health metrics than Japanese in Japan. They still do better than whites in the US.
>Don't eat canned food. Don't eat frozen food. Don't eat packaged food, often labeled "natural" or "organic." [1]
Learn how to cook mister, just like real grown ups do!
I'm sorry to say but if you are eating a certain way and it is hurting your body and you don't have the right mindset to change your lifestyle no matter if you are european/american you need to stop eating that. I know obesity is more of a concern in america. And I know most of the junk food origins from usa (mcdonalds for ex).
>Learn how to cook mister, just like real grown ups do!
Patronizing. Do you know real grown ups can cook bad foods at home too? Not everything cooked from scratch is healthy!
>I'm sorry to say but if you are eating a certain way and it is hurting your body and you don't have the right mindset to change your lifestyle no matter if you are european/american you need to stop eating that.
JUST BE HEALTHY, FAT PEOPLE! You don't need any education about macro/micro-nutrients, food portions, exercise routines, and/or preparation.
>I know obesity is more of a concern in america.
Compared to what? There are 10+ countries with obesity rates higher than America.
>And I know most of the junk food origins from usa (mcdonalds for ex).
No shit Sherlock. I'm talking about cooked-home food. If you can't make the decision of what you should cook, what you need and what is healthy and how to do it then you're better off eating the shit they serve you at mcdonalds in that case.
>JUST BE HEALTHY, FAT PEOPLE! You don't need any education about macro/micro-nutrients, food portions, exercise routines, and/or preparation.
Actually you don't need to be a rocket scientist to eat properly/healthy. I'm sorry to tell you that. Internet is full of recepies etc. And I'm not talking about exercises at all, why do you bring that into discussion?
>You have to be kidding me.
No I'm not. Look at the origin of companies controlling unhealthy foodchain.
Systematic evaluation of what has worked for millennia is science. If you mean just gathering unstructured anecdotes of uncertain provenance about the past and using them to construct just-so stories as guides, well, that's not particularly likely to be more useful than just randomly guessing what you should eat, though it's pretty close to how many diet fads get created.
Continuued promotion of the false premise that, eating saturated fat and cholesterol is unhealthy,has literally killed and caused misery to hundreds of millions.
ie Those responsible are mass murderers.
Butter was demonised, yet grass fed butter is far healthier than any oil, including olive oil.
Ghee has the highest smoke point, many vegetable oils turn to poison when heated because they are unsaturated ie far less stable, they also spoil very easily.
I make ghee by gently boiling Rachel's organic butter for 30 minutes, then filtering through cheese cloth, it tastes great and smells lovely and nutty, unlike shop bought ghee which smells off to me.
IMHO, whenever you get people saying "Wouldn't it be wonderful if the science said <x> because it would help with <some other thing that is hard to figure out>" you get one of these situations.