Since the 1950s, people have believed that saturated fat is bad for human health.
This was originally based on observational studies showing that countries that consumed a lot of saturated fat had higher rates of deaths from heart disease.
The diet-heart hypothesis states that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol in the blood, which then supposedly lodges in the arteries and causes heart disease.
Even though this hypothesis has never been proven, most official dietary guidelines are based on it (1).
Interestingly, numerous recent studies have found no link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease.
This article reviews 5 of the largest, most comprehensive and most recent studies on this issue.And this is medicine, where statistical testing can reasonably be performed. Macroeconomics?
AlterNet
The Surprising Truth About Saturated Fat
Adda Bjarnadóttir, Authority Nutrition
18 comments:
Tom,
Not sure about this. Ancel Keys would likely disagree. At any rate Carbsane has many good thoughts on the subject. Worth investigating:
http://carbsanity.blogspot.com/2014/09/its-question-time-again-saturated-fats.html
She has many other post on the subject and the comment section is usually very informative.
Until there is proof of a hypothesis derived from theory, the issue remains unsettled. Opposing studies suggest that an issue is unsettled science.
Conventional economists, on the other hand, assert based on theory alone that macro is settled and the policy implications are clear. That's just BS.
Actually, "proof" is the wrong term here. It should be substantial evidence.
And while we say that some issues are "settled," science is always tentative since probably 1 is reserved for tautology. General descriptions of sets whose boundaries are indeterminate can be falsified by counter-instances in the future.
“We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row,” said David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer.
@Malmo!
"Not sure about this. Ancel Keys would likely disagree."
? ? ? !!! Ancel Keys has been disgraced for what he did. Didn't you hear about the scandal last year? it changed the way medical papers are reviewed before publication and caused the top journals to insist that all data involved in the studies must now be submitted pre-publication, or you can forget about seeing your work in print. His papers have been removed from the medical literature for his methods. Matt Ridley, in The Times, wrote an op-ed about it--the first one I grabbed in a search that was not behind a paywall.
In the 1950s, an upsurge in heart disease in American men (probably caused mostly by smoking) led the physiologist Ancel Keys to guess that dietary cholesterol was to blame. When that seemed not to fit, he switched to saturated fat as a cause of high blood cholesterol. To make his case he did things like leave out contradictory data, shift points on graphs and skate over inconvenient facts. He then got big charities and state agencies on side and bullied his critics into silence.
His most famous study, the seven-country study, started out much larger; he dropped 16 countries from the sample to get a significant correlation. Add them back in and it vanishes. Hidden in his data is the fact that people in Corfu and Crete (in the same country) ate the same amounts of saturated fats, but the Cretans died 17 times more frequently of heart attacks.
In the 1970s, the famous Framingham Heart Study stumbled on the fact that people with high cholesterol over the age of 47 (long before most people have heart attacks) lived longer than those with low cholesterol, and that those whose cholesterol dropped faced higher risk of death. But the consensus ignored this and sailed on.
If challenged to show evidence for low-cholesterol advice, the medical and scientific profession has tended to argue from authority — by pointing to WHO guidelines or other such official compendia, and say “check the references in there”. But those references lead back to Keys and Framingham and other such dodgy dossiers. Thus does bad science get laundered into dogma. “One of the great commandments of science is ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’,” said Carl Sagan.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/cholesterol-is-not-bad-for-you.aspx
To be contd.
CONTD.
[Whoops, I guess I accidentally included some html marks to start the quote above, and you can't tell. The Ridley quote starts with "In the 1950a" and ends with "Carl Sagan."]
A few newspapers in England and NYC covered this scandal, then it was hushed up with the science journals doing their damnedest to get the mea culpas out of the way and sweep public awareness under the rug. Forty years of careers went up in smoke with this revelation.
Which country eats more saturated fats than the rest? France. Yet mortality from ischaemic heart disease in France is about a quarter that of Britain, and less than Germany, Spain, or Italy. Or the US, per capita. And the French don't have our obesity problems.
I wish I could find my copy of the paper that uncovered Keys' work. They lacerated his methods and protocols. It was fraud.
I strongly suggest reading the entire Ridley article. Who knew that it was only the liver that makes cholesterol and it has nothing to do with what you ingest.
Here's the world ranking for heart disease by country: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-heart-disease/by-country/
How long have we heard the current mantra that flatulence from cows is raising the methane in the air? So everyone is going meatless to save the planet.
Guess what? Talk to a fucking dairy farmer. Cows don't fart. They are physically incapable of it (because of their three-stomach structure and they're vegan, they eat grass). They burp. Occasionally.
So Ancel Keys did a Reinhart and Rogoff. Or Reinhart and Rogoff did an Ancel Keys.
And even if the cows fart the carbon in the fart would have come from the feed they ate which had to have been in the air in the first place....
The problem with diet is the same as the problem with economics. You can't actually do double blind testing.
People sort of know the difference between a steak and a lettuce leaf.
So as usual what happens is you get a religious lobby going, a bunch of followers, some simplistic assumptions and then you curve fit data to your hypothesis.
The 'Mediterranean diet' is the classic one - which conspicuously excludes the French and their red wine/high meat diet. And who live just as long as all the other mediterraneans.
"When confronted with nonsupportive evidence, the
anticholesterol mainstream typically engages a two-pronged
strategy. First, it simply ignores contradictory evidence. Second, it
simultaneously seeks out supportive evidence, no matter how
flimsy, and then embarks on an aggressive propaganda campaign to
“educate” as many people as possible about it. The end result is that
the public receives a distorted picture of the existing evidence."
http://www.jpands.org/vol10no3/colpo.pdf
Now doesn't that sound familiar.
I quite like Anthony Colpo when it comes to diet. He's another Aussie that isn't afraid to call out the bullshitters.
For decades, under a consensus view, doctors in the US prescribed low sodium diets for people with high blood pressure. Because models. Now that the studies are in, it turns out that restricted sodium diets have higher mortality rates for people with high blood pressure than non-restricted diets.
Doctors used to tell patients with arteriosclerosis to forgo butter, for trans-fat loaded margarine that really did cause disease. The models suggested.
Science isn't based on consensuses, what people model, what people believe to be true, or opinion surveys. Science is based on controlled, collected data. I think media doesn't help because they report as science, non-science. Peer reviewed journals, like Science, have found ~ 2/3 of their published work can not be replicated. So peer-review doesn't help much either. People generally lie and exaggerate and are prone to hysteria to try and "fit in" and agree with what other peers want to believe. In Economics, where it is mostly political opinion masquerading, it seems impossible that things could ever improve. Let he who has the most persuasive argument win!
"Nutrition is personal. Identical foods produce “healthy” and “unhealthy” responses in different individuals.
http://news.meta.com/2015/11/19/cell-nutrition-is-personal-identical-foods-produce-healthy-and-unhealthy-responses-in-different-individuals/
The bovine emission of concern is methane, not CO2. Methane is by several orders of magnitude a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon. It is a bigger molecule and therefore traps more heat in the atmosphere.
"Nutrition is personal. Identical foods produce “healthy” and “unhealthy” responses in different individuals.
This was already known for hundreds of years, if not millennia, in traditional health system such as Ayurveda and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). It's based on constitution and present state, and is influenced by a variety of factors including climate, occupation, etc.
These systems also consider the human system to be part of the planetary and cosmic systems, and the human system is comprised of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, for example. The emphasis is balance and harmony based on one's physical, emotional, mental and spiritual constitution.
Traditional health systems emphasize therapeutics, prevention and perfection. A well functioning health care system should result in a population with high level wellness and integration, with a minimum of therapy needed as well as minimal social dysfunction.
Granted this is theoretical and thus far scientific research on it is limited, but those who have experience with it provide anecdotal evidence. Of course, there is also a lot of fringe BS associated with it, too, as well as excessive claims.
@The Just Gatekeeper,
The heat radiated from earth is very specifically in the temperature range of 220 to 320 K, and the peak Infrared (IR) associated with that temperature range is 9 to 13 microns. Methane does not absorb in that band (N-Band). Infrared methanometers (used in mines) operate on the principle that methane gas will absorb infrared light at certain wavelengths including 1.33, 1.66, 3.3, and 7.6 microns. (Used to be here: "Use of infrared sensors for monitoring methane in underground mines"
http://www.smenet.org/docs/meetings/2008/046.pdf)
Wien's Law: 7.6 microns is 381K = 226.3 F.
220K to 320K = -63.7F - 116.3F
===================
BTWw, liked your Trump article.
@The Just Gatekeeper
About that methane panic. It was mainly coming from Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge. Impressive title. Wadhams claimed all sort of hyperbolic things about methane, and that the arctic would be ice-free in 2015. American and Canadian polar ice scientists went after him with a vengeance in the NYT for the distortions, and lack of facts.
The journal "Nature," responded to the panic and inserted this paper under its Nature Education Knowledge Project. The paper says it will be 1000 years before there will be any effect.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/methane-hydrates-and-contemporary-climate-change-24314790
Conclusions
Catastrophic, widespread dissociation of methane gas hydrates will not be triggered by continued climate warming at contemporary rates (0.2ºC per decade; IPCC 2007) over timescales of a few hundred years. Most of Earth's gas hydrates occur at low saturations and in sediments at such great depths below the seafloor or onshore permafrost that they will barely be affected by warming over even 10*3 [1,000] yr.
Thanks for the Colpo article.
Neil,
The 'Mediterranean diet' is the classic one - which conspicuously excludes the French and their red wine/high meat diet. And who live just as long as all the other mediterraneans.
Ditto the Uruguayans, if that's how you spell its citizenry.
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