"Why sugar is worse than fat"

It was in the late '70s – in fact, there was a Senate commission, Senator McGovern, who actually looked at this issue and found that people who had very high levels of cholesterol tended to die early of heart disease. And there was also other studies that showed if you ate a diet high in fat, it raised your cholesterol. But those were two different studies. And they got really, really linked, not only by the Senate, but also in the scientific community and then by everybody else.

And what happened over the last 30 years, it got codified. It became the way that we eat low fat in this country. And nothing changed. In fact, things got worse. Cardiovascular disease remains the biggest killer of men and women. Diabetes rates are higher than ever before. Childhood obesity. So it didn't work. And I think that's what sort of prompted all this analysis.

I think there's two issues here. One is that fat doesn't get a free pass here. There's still some problems with it. It still raises cholesterol levels. That is associated with heart disease. The problem is that what we replaced fat with was sugar. And sugar may be more problematic, in some ways, for someone who's worried about heart disease than fat.

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/09/10/why-sugar-is-worse-than-fat/?hpt=hp_t3
 All true, and yet, Dr. Gupta goes on to show he still doesn't really get it. So here's my dare to the doctor - provide one intervention study that supports your concerns about saturated fat and heart disease.

It's hard not to point out that he's about 7 years late to the low carb dance ...

Better Late Then Never, NIH Figures It Out

Results: Sixty participants (82%) in the low-fat group and 59 (79%) in the low-carbohydrate group completed the intervention. At 12 months, participants on the low-carbohydrate diet had greater decreases in weight (mean difference in change, −3.5 kg [95% CI, −5.6 to −1.4 kg]; P = 0.002), fat mass (mean difference in change, −1.5% [CI, −2.6% to −0.4%]; P = 0.011), ratio of total–high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (mean difference in change, −0.44 [CI, −0.71 to −0.16]; P = 0.002), and triglyceride level (mean difference in change, −0.16 mmol/L [−14.1 mg/dL] [CI, −0.31 to −0.01 mmol/L {−27.4 to −0.8 mg/dL}]; P = 0.038) and greater increases in HDL cholesterol level (mean difference in change, 0.18 mmol/L [7.0 mg/dL] [CI, 0.08 to 0.28 mmol/L {3.0 to 11.0 mg/dL}]; P < 0.001) than those on the low-fat diet.

Limitation: Lack of clinical cardiovascular disease end points.

Conclusion: The low-carbohydrate diet was more effective for weight loss and cardiovascular risk factor reduction than the low-fat diet. Restricting carbohydrate may be an option for persons seeking to lose weight and reduce cardiovascular risk factors.

Primary Funding Source: National Institutes of Health.

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1900694

I'm glad they finally got around to doing this since it's too obvious for anyone to still ignore, but they could have done this 40 years ago.  And they should have.

Saturated Fatty Acids

The linked article contains a nice analysis of health correlations related to saturated fatty acids (SFA). SFA's have been vilified as causatory agents in heart and other vascular diseases.  However, the analysis points out that the correlations with disease are strong with SFA's that are produced by the body as a result of carb, sugar and alcohol ingestion, vice ingestion of fats.  By contrast, blood SFA's that are associated with fat ingestion are inversely correlated with the aforementioned diseases.  In a way, this is just a BFO - blinding flash of the obvious - as it's been long known that blood triglycerides, including the SFA palmitic acid, are very well correlated with disease and metabolic syndrome. The nice thing about this analysis is it finds the same conclusion via a different methodology.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(14)70166-4/fulltext

The Reporter Probably Knows Less About Cholesterol Than ....

"Studies showed us that high cholesterol levels were one of the most important risk factors for the development of heart attack and stroke, and we had evidence that lowering cholesterol lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke," Ridker says. "You can't say that about most everything else."

But looking at just one number doesn't provide a detailed-enough picture to precisely assess risk, because it doesn't account for the interplay among LDL, HDL and triglycerides, or the fact that each of these affects risk in a different way, Mozaffarian says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/you-probably-know-less-about-cholesterol-than-you-think-you-do-heres-some-help/2014/06/16/d9fa9350-e4fa-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html

The headline was "you probably know less about cholesterol than you think you do."

The irony is killing me!  The scientific and medical community went a non-scientific lark for 30 years and they think "we" don't know much about cholesterol?  Expletive deleted here.

The first line of the article refers to a cardiologist who has to re-teach everyone what they should know about cholesterol - because his profession has been butchering this stuff for years.  Shame on them.  A money quote:

"There's a lot of confusion and controversy around cholesterol," says Mozaffarian, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School. "There is even confusion among the scientists who study it."

Of course there is.  That is why the scientific method is needed.  The problem was, folks used their power and positions of authority to spread conjectures about the science of cholesterol as if it were scientifically proven truth.  Why?

 "Studies showed us that high cholesterol levels were one of the most important risk factors for the development of heart attack and stroke, and we had evidence that lowering cholesterol lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke," Ridker says. "You can't say that about most everything else."

Translation: There's a weak correlation between high total cholesterol and CVD, and there's limited evidence, very little, that shows lowering cholesterol can reduce the incidence of CVD.  But there was never strong evidence that lowering blood cholesterol - either total or LDL - could be used for primary prevention of CVD.  

The author goes on to describe various results of epidemiological studies, all of which have been "shown by studies" to be junk.

To make sure the irony levels in your blood are high enough, the author dives right into unproven speculation about how to "reduce your risk" (aka how folks who do epidemiology assess risk via mathematics, which has nothing to do with actually determining how these behaviors affect live people via intervention study), by doing this, that or the other to change the numbers reflected on your lipid panel.  Which is to say - the author just continues the cycle of confusing speculation based on expert opinion, immature science and ..... bovine excrement.

Example:  Should you try to raise your HDL by medications or some magic pill (niacin, for example)?  No, that has been proved not to work, and may be harmful.  In other words, folks with high HDL generally are healthier, but if you take a sick person and manipulate their HDL it does not help.

A lovely understatement, for those who appreciate understatement:
"But there is some disagreement over which dietary changes are best for heart health, says Roger Blumenthal, director of the Ciccarone Center."
Translation:  "We don't have a freaking clue."

""For most people, cholesterol from food isn't a contributor to their cholesterol levels," Blumenthal says."
And for those whose blood cholesterol levels are affected by their dietary cholesterol intake, they have no idea whether that matters at all in the cause of CVD.

"High-fat foods, such as cheese and chocolate, have also been regarded as verboten, yet "the evidence for this may not be as strong as we once thought," he says."
Translation:  "We didn't have a freaking clue, but were unable to keep our mouths shut."

 So, in the face of all of the mis-information in just this one article, much less the rest of the web, what a guy or gal to do?

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, and no sugar/wheat.

Make your belly smaller, increase your muscle mass, learn more each day about how to eat for health and performance.

Jimmy Moore on Time Article

As for the Time column by Walsh, he did an amazing job of explaining that there was never any science that proved any of the gloom and doom predictions about fat's impact on our health. We grew up on fat-free and low-fat everything because the United States government decided to start meddling in the nutritional affairs of Americans by offering up dietary advice based on propaganda and not on any solid science. Once that happened in earnest beginning in 1980, the fat-phobia was underway and we're still living under those auspices in 2014. Food companies attempted to cash in on this new trend and pumped out more and more products that have been stripped of fat. Did we get healthier as a result? You already know the answer.

The statistics Walsh cites are mind boggling. We think we have a healthcare crisis, but what we have is a preventative disease epidemic that a low-carb, high-fat diet could help with. My Cholesterol Clarity and Keto Clarity coauthor Dr. Eric Westman was quoted in this story explaining that "the studies to support (low-carb, high-fat diets) do exist." There was a hope that when people cut their saturated fat intake that they would replace those foods with more fruits and vegetables. That didn't happen. Instead, they ate more carbohydrates, grains, sugar and other sweeteners than ever before!

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/commentary-time-magazine-pushes-fat-myths-offers-mea-culpa-in-2014/22899

The day is coming when folks will snicker under their breath "that health care professional still thinks saturated fat is bad for you."

The Livin' La Vida Low-Carb Show With Jimmy Moore

Check out this cool episode: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/livin-la-vida-low-carb-show/id324601605?mt=2&i=313777331

Have a listen to podcast 823 in which Nina Teicholz lays it out about how we came to think saturated fat was bad, how polyunsaturates were a sickening substitute, and how vegetable oils can make your uniform spontaneously combust.  Unbelievable.

Jimmy Reviews Nina T - It's a Hit

But what Teicholz does so brilliantly throughout her book is offer up illustrations and actual statistical data that underscores why Keys was wrong, how he got it so inexplicably wrong, and why the mistakes he made in his research never got corrected despite the fact it is well-known that he omitted statistical data that disproved his theory. It’s quite the sordid tale that is worth the price of this book just to get that history behind the worldwide launch of the low-fat diet fad. This should be required reading for every doctor, dietitian and nutritional health researcher so they don’t go down the same path that Keys did.

But Teicholz goes beyond the story of Ancel Keys and turns her attention to what actually happened (the unintended consequences) as a result of what he promoted as fact a half century ago. The low-fat lie became deeply entrenched into every fiber of our being as an absolute, unassailable truth and yet there was never one iota of solid research (randomized, controlled, clinical trials are the gold standard for making claims in science) ever conducted. But when you repeat an untruth over and over and over again so many times, even the perpetrator of the lie can become convinced it’s actually true. And that’s exactly where we are with saturated fat today.

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/book-review-the-big-fat-surprise-by-nina-teicholz/22762?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LivinLaVidaLowCarbBlog+%28Jimmy+Moore%27s+Livin%27+La+Vida+Low+Carb+Blog%29

Eades Quoting "Big Fat Surprise"

Meanwhile the Native Americans of the Southwest were observed between 1898 and 1905 by the physician-turned-anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, who wrote up his observations in a 460-page report for the Smithsonian Institute. The Native Americans he visited were eating a diet predominantly of meat, mainly from buffalo, yet, as Hrdlička observed, they seemed to be spectacularly healthy and live to a ripe old age. The incidence of centenarians among these Native Americans was, according to the 1900 US Census, 224 per million men and 254 per million women, compared to only 3 and 6 per million among men and women in the white population. Although Hrdlička noted that these numbers were probably not wholly accurate, he wrote that “no error could account for the extreme disproportion of centenarians observed.” Among the elderly he met of age ninety and up, “not one of those was either much demented or helpless.”

Hrdlička was further struck by the complete absence of chronic disease among the entire Indian population he saw. “Malignant disease,” he wrote, “if they exist at all — that they do would be difficult to doubt — must be extremely rare.” He was told of ‘tumors’ and saw several cases of the fibroid variety, but never came across a clear case of any one kind of tumor, nor any cancer. Hrdlička wrote that he saw only three cases of heart disease among more than two thousand Native Americans examined, and “not one pronounced instance” of atherosclerosis. Varicose veins were rare. Nor did he observe cases of appendicitis, peritonitis, ulcer of the stomach, nor any “grave disease” of the liver. Although we cannot assume that eating meat was responsible for their good health and long life, it would be logical to conclude that a dependence on meat in no way impaired good health. [My italics]

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/big-fat-surprise/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+drmikenutritionblog+%28The+Blog+of+Michael+R.+Eades%2C+M.D.%29

Protein Power Review of "Big Fat Surprise"

Nina Teicholz is a married mother of two living in New York City. She is an investigative journalist and food writer by trade. When she first moved to New York, she was following a low-fat, USDA Food Pyramid style diet. Her life changed when she began writing restaurant reviews. She ate whatever the chefs she was reviewing sent out, which was often “paté, beef of every cut prepared in every imaginable way, cream sauces, cream soups, foie gras – all the foods [she] had avoided [her] entire life.”

She ate an enormous amount of fatty food, and despite her worries to the contrary, her cholesterol numbers didn’t go through the roof. But best of all, she lost the ten pounds she had been struggling to shed.

Her editor at Gourmet asked her to write an article about trans fats. The article ended up getting her a book contract, and the research she did for it launched her on her Herculean task of researching and writing The Big Fat Surprise (BFS). She tells the story of how we Americans went from eating enormous amounts of saturated fat (all the while suffering virtually no heart disease) to now eating fats in restaurants that, when heated, throw off a shellac-like substance so toxic it requires workers in hazmat gear to clean up after them.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/big-fat-surprise/

In another couple of years, no one will bat an eye at these books, as the Ship of Lowfatisbad will have completed the turn, and sugar will be the recipient of all of saturated fat's hate - except for a few true believers who love animals and thus can't get with saturated animal fats under any circumstance. It is taking a long time, but the light may be seen at the end of the tunnel.

Shout out to Gary Taubes, the first science writer/researcher to get this topic back on the scope of legitimate scientific inquiry!

Saturated Fat Is Your Friend

A very nicely written summary of why:
-Saturated fats were never proven to be unhealthy, and why other foods we've been substituting for sat fats may be "really" unhealthy
-Why polyunsaturated oils, recommended for years for their cholesterol lowering qualities, may be much worse for you than sat fats, especially when hydrogenated
-Why carbs are problematic as substitutes for fat in the diet, and have been a part of making us fat, sick and diabetic
-Why women in particular need to think about cholesterol levels differently than we've all been told

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303678404579533760760481486?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303678404579533760760481486.html%3Fmod%3DWSJ_hppMIDDLENex

Butter Back, But Where's the Apology?

Julia Child, goddess of fat, is beaming somewhere. Butter is back, and when you’re looking for a few chunks of pork for a stew, you can resume searching for the best pieces — the ones with the most fat. Eventually, your friends will stop glaring at you as if you’re trying to kill them.

That the worm is turning became increasingly evident a couple of weeks ago, when a meta-analysis published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine found that there’s just no evidence to support the notion that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease. (In fact, there’s some evidence that a lack of saturated fat may be damaging.) The researchers looked at 72 different studies and, as usual, said more work — including more clinical studies — is needed. For sure. But the days of skinless chicken breasts and tubs of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter may finally be drawing to a close.

The tip of this iceberg has been visible for years, and we’re finally beginning to see the base. Of course, no study is perfect and few are definitive. But the real villains in our diet — sugar and ultra-processed foods — are becoming increasingly apparent. You can go back to eating butter, if you haven’t already.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/opinion/bittman-butter-is-back.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&referrer=

Bittman recently called Dean Ornish one of the most knowledgeable men in the world about heart disease (or something like that), an unabashed kiss of the derriere, so for him to come up with a column like this is noteworthy.

The rest of the article is a good read, but I could beat up every line from one angle or another.  Mostly, I wonder "where's the apology?"  Bittman participated with the government and all the hip wannabe scientists to pretend they knew that saturated fat was bad for us, and the in process had a bunch of eating truly wretched levels of sugar and grains and processed foods laden with industrially produced "vegetable oils" - and that crap has been killing people.  More people than wars, more people than drugs.  As this huge super-tanker full of tortured dietary science makes it's long turn away from the saturated fat scare, few will admit to what they did to their fellow humans based on their arrogance and willingness to bank on immature and incomplete science.  Some days that has me boiling mad.

And I think I'm just going to have to get over it.

Minger Hits the Bullseye

This is the same description of this process that is elegantly described in the Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living, and which ties together the conjectures about the risks of carbs and/or fats:

More robust evidence exists for the "food depends on context" argument, and the data continues to mount in this direction.
A 2011 review in The Netherlands Journal of Medicine evaluated our collective body of research on saturated fat, carbohydrate, and cardiovascular disease, proposing an intriguing hypothesis about the behavior of saturated fat under different dietary circumstance.  Though more research is needed to test it, the theory may reconcile the inconsistencies popping up between clinical studies and epidemiology.  The review found that the modern diet tends to promote chronic, low-grade inflammation - response triggered by damage to your body's tissues.  The inflammation then cripples the body's ability to protect itself from other damage.  Basically, that chronic inflammation sets the stage for disease.
The paper's authors suggest that dietary saturated fat -while not a health-harming entity in and of itself-may become problematic if it's dumped on top of a soup of inflammation and excess carbohydrate.  Such a situation can lead to a buildup of saturated fatty acids in the body, notably as higher levels of free fatty acids in plasma lipids. (Those excess free fatty acids have long been linked with conditions like insulin resistance and diabetes, largely contributing to saturated fat's blacklisted status in the nutrition world.)
Explaining the phenomenon, the authors wrote:

"The adverse effects of high SAFA (saturated fatty acid) intake on lipid metabolism are particularly noted when SAFA are combined with a high CHO (carbohydrate) intake.  Under these conditions, dietary SAFA are preserved, while the surplus of the consumed CHO is converted SAFA by hepatic de novo fatty acid synthesis.  Taken together, SAFA accumulate:  1) under eucaloric conditions in normal weight subjects who consume a CHO-rich diet with high glycaemic index; and 2) under hypo caloric conditions in subjects with the metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease who consume CHO-rich diets.  Thus CHO, particularly those with a high glycemic index, and pre-existing insulin resistance are confounding factors in the discussion on the relation between CVD (cardiovascular disease) and dietary SAFA."

Death By Food Pyramid, Denise Minger

In short, if you eat an amount of carbohydrate that exceeds your body's tolerance for carbohydrate consumption, your blood will be loaded with a large quantity of fat (long standing knowledge that blood triglycerides are rapidly reduced with carb restriction).  The fat accumulates because the body prioritizes disposition of excess sugar over disposition of excess fat.  In the individual chronically overcoming carbs, the body not only doesn't burn fat often, it loses the ability to burn much fat (simple use it or lose it adaptations).  This cycle of excess carb consumption causes a host of problems, including the above referenced chronic low level inflammation.

In this storm of problems that results when too much carbohydrate is ingested, eating fat will add to the body's problem of fat disposition, further loading the blood with fat.  So, the perfect storm for high fat in the blood is a high fat, high sugar/carb diet.

This is also the root of the explanation for why there are some folks who are fat but healthy, and others who are not.  Excess body fat is a correlate of metabolic derangement - which means you are sick - but some have excess body fat but are not metabolically deranged.

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

The Long Slow Turn

In one paper, published by Swedish researchers in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared with men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy.

Yep, that's right. The butter and whole-milk eaters did better at keeping the pounds off.

"I would say it's counterintuitive," says Greg Miller, executive vice president of the National Dairy Council.

The second study, published in the European Journal of Nutrition, is a meta-analysis of 16 observational studies. There has been a hypothesis that high-fat dairy foods contribute to obesity and heart disease risk, but the reviewers concluded that the evidence does not support this hypothesis. In fact, the reviewers found that in most of the studies, high-fat dairy was associated with a lower risk of obesity.

"We continue to see more and more data coming out [finding that] consumption of whole-milk dairy products is associated with reduced body fat," Miller says.

It's not clear what might explain this phenomenon. Lots of folks point to the satiety factor. The higher levels of fat in whole milk products may make us feel fuller, faster. And as a result, the thinking goes, we may end up eating less.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/02/12/275376259/the-full-fat-paradox-whole-milk-may-keep-us-lean

When I was afloat on the USS ENTERPRISE I would talk about the characteristics of our ~1100 foot long ship - she could move with great speed, and could accelerate the incomprehensibly large mass of herself with equally amazing power.  She could turn hard enough to tilt the deck five degrees.  The larger super-tankers on the other hand had a legendary inability to turn.  It was a long, slow process and required the tanker captains and their crews to plan their maneuvers with a long lead time.  

I'm reminded of that as I watch these news flashes about health and fat.  One by one, the years of assumption and conjecture about fat's supposed negative health impacts are being proved what they were - assumptions and conjectures.  

If you like milk, it's worth getting the benefit of whole milk.

BMJ: We Missed the Mark on Sat Fat

This is a great read, I highly recommend you read the whole piece.

"The aspect of dietary saturated fat that is believed to have the greatest influence on cardiovascular risk is elevated concentrations of low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Yet the reduction in LDL cholesterol from reducing saturated fat intake seems to be specific to large, buoyant (type A) LDL particles, when in fact it is the small, dense (type B) particles (responsive to carbohydrate intake) that are implicated in cardiovascular disease.4

"Indeed, recent prospective cohort studies have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk.5 Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective. The source of the saturated fat may be important. Dairy foods are exemplary providers of vitamins A and D. As well as a link between vitamin D deficiency and a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, calcium and phosphorus found commonly in dairy foods may have antihypertensive effects that may contribute to inverse associations with cardiovascular risk.6 7 8 One study showed that higher concentrations of plasmatrans-palmitoleic acid, a fatty acid mainly found in dairy foods, was associated with higher concentrations of high density lipoprotein, lower concentrations of triglycerides and C reactive protein, reduced insulin resistance, and a lower incidence of diabetes in adults.9 Red meat is another major source of saturated fat. Consumption of processed meats, but not red meat, has been associated with coronary heart disease and diabetes mellitus, which may be explained by nitrates and sodium as preservatives.10

"The notoriety of fat is based on its higher energy content per gram in comparison with protein and carbohydrate. However, work by the biochemist Richard Feinman and nuclear physicist Eugene Fine on thermodynamics and the metabolic advantage of different diet compositions showed that the body did not metabolise different macronutrients in the same way.11 Kekwick and Pawan carried out one of the earliest obesity experiments, published in the Lancet in 1956.12 They compared groups consuming diets of 90% fat, 90% protein, and 90% carbohydrate and showed that the greatest weight loss was in the fat consuming group. The authors concluded that the “composition of the diet appeared to outweigh in importance the intake of calories.”

"The “calorie is not a calorie” theory has been further substantiated by a recent JAMAstudy showing that a “low fat” diet resulted in the greatest decrease in energy expenditure, an unhealthy lipid pattern, and increased insulin resistance in comparison with a low carbohydrate and low glycaemic index diet.13 In the past 30 years in the United States the proportion of energy from consumed fat has fallen from 40% to 30% (although absolute fat consumption has remained the same), yet obesity has rocketed."

This one is a mind blower, as I have read the NNT was 100, whereas baby aspirin is 40.  It's much worse than that:

"A meta-analysis of predominantly industry sponsored data reported that in a low risk group of people aged 60-70 years taking statins the number needed to treat (NNT) to prevent one cardiovascular event in one year was 345.20 The strongest evidence base for statins is in secondary prevention, where all patients after a myocardial infarction are prescribed maximum dose treatment irrespective of total cholesterol, because of statins’ anti-inflammatory or pleiotropic (coronary plaque stabilising) effects. In this group the NNT is 83 for mortality over five years. This doesn’t mean that each patient benefits a little but rather that 82 will receive no prognostic benefit.21 The fact that no other cholesterol lowering drug has shown a benefit in terms of mortality supports the hypothesis that the benefits of statins are independent of their effects on cholesterol."

http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6340

Time to end the war against saturated fat? - latimes.com

"Malhotra cites a 2009 UCLA study showing that three-quarters of patients admitted to the hospital with acute myocardial infarction do not have high total cholesterol; what they do have, at a rate of 66%, is metabolic syndrome -- a cluster of worrying signs including hypertension, high fasting blood sugar, abdominal obesity, high triglycerides and low HDL ("good" cholesterol).

"Meanwhile, research has shown that when people with high LDL cholesterol (the "bad" kind) purge their diet of saturated fats, they lower one kind of LDL (the large, buoyant particles called "Type A" LDL), but not the small, dense particles ("Type B" LDL) that are linked to high carbohydrate intake and are implicated in heart disease.

"Recent research has also shown that Mediterranean diets -- admittedly skimpy on red meat but hardly light on saturated fats -- have outpaced both statins and low-fat diets as a means of preventing repeat heart attacks. Other research suggests that the saturated fat in dairy foods may protect against hypertension, inflammation and a host of other dysfunctions increasingly linked to heart attacks."

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-saturated-fat-20131022,0,2193813.story#axzz2iyzEOz96

The case against saturated fat was never strong, and it looks sillier and sillier each day.  None of the predicted benefits of restricting saturated fat have materialized for either populations or individuals.  The case that government killed thousands by recommending low fat diets on weak science is much stronger than the case against saturated fat.  Please insert rant here about unaccountable pseudo scientific recommendations by government entities.

What Is Unseen (Thanks Bastiat!)

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/10/25/not_debatable_saturated_fat_is_bad_for_you_106734.html
In the article linked above, the author makes a case against saturated fat intake that amounts to an epidemiological conjecture dressed in scientific sheep's clothing.  It also reminds me of one of my favorite economics treatises, "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen", which is referred to as "The Parable of the Broken Window" or "The Broken Window Fallacy".  I read this thing annually and it is remarkable how relevant it is today, even though it was written over 100 years ago.

In this author's defense of the saturated fat is bad for you conjecture, what is not seen is any evidence an intervention study would provide.  There's a good reason why that author did not reference intervention studies that show saturated fat is bad for you - there are no such studies.

I could repeat my repeated descriptions of why epidemiological studies do not prove anything and don't "show" anything except correlations (IOW, the sun comes up and I wake up - but which caused which?  Epidemiology cannot tell you the answer to that question).  If you are curious, this article tells the story of how epidemiology went wrong at length and in detail:
Taubes - Do We Really Know?

In other words, there's only one thing this article presents - the author's opinion about how to interpret epidemiology and other non-intervention based scientific evidence, and that's great.  The only reason the article is the least bit interesting is the author's claim, in the title, that the saturated fat conjecture is not debatable.  Hopefully that's the editor's doing, and not the author's.  As a "scientist", the author should know debate never ends in science.  All scientific work is subject to debate.  The point of science is to discern what may be true by always looking for the way to disprove the matter at hand.

The effort to disprove never ends.  Everything is always debatable.  If we found an apple that floats in the air, or a situation in which matter cannot be converted to energy and instead simply evaporates to nothing, we'd have to review certain "laws" (laws are those conjectures that have survived every attempt at disproof over a long time by many who try to disprove).  

One needn't be a "scientist" with a PHD to know the reality of the scientific method.  The frustrating thing is how many "scientists" seem to think that opinions of scientists are related to the scientific method.  They are not.  Even if every scientist believed saturated fat is bad for you, that would not mean anything scientifically speaking.

So, what happens when you eat saturated fat?  Will it kill you?  Here's what happened to me.  My body weight dropped over six years from 225 to my current 195.  My cholesterol numbers are the envy of my doctors - trigs 25-75, HDL 60-75, and LDL estimated at 114.  My waist is three inches smaller.  I feel good, sleep well and perform well in my athletic pursuits.  I eat sat fat by the boatload - butter, MCTs, heavy cream in my coffee, sour cream, cream cheese, hard cheeses, and red meat whenever I like.  In other words, every known health marker improved when I ate MORE fat and less carbohydrate.

What happens when you eat high fat and moderate to low carb?  Your body burns saturated fats for fuel, which reduces the saturated fat to water and CO2.  What happens when you eat low fat and high carb?  Tour body makes a saturated fat from the carbs, and blood levels of fats go much higher (measured as triglycerides).  The reverse is also true (and testable by you in your body):  when fat consumption replaces carb consumption, triglycerides go down.  So if you want to raise the levels of fat floating around your veins, by all means, pig out on pizza, whole grains, and especially sugary foods of any kind.

In short, beware the opinion dressed in scientific sheep's clothing.  Until they complete rigorous intervention studies that show mortality reduction via restriction of saturated fat, "they got nothing."

Amerisave Group, Thank You!

Hi folks, I enjoyed speaking and visiting with you today, thanks for your attentive listening and good questions.

Here's the list of excellent high fat foods:

}1. Avocados – 82.5% fat

}2. Butter – 100% fat

}3. Whole eggs – 61% fat

}4. Coconut oil – 100% fat

}5. Bacon – 69.5% fat

}6. Sour cream – 88.5% fat

}7. 70% Ground beef – 59.5% fat

}8. Full-fat cheddar cheese – 74% fat

}9. Coconut – 88% fat

}10. Dark chocolate – 65% fat

}11. Cream cheese – 88.5% fat

If you get 100g of protein, and 100g of carbs/veggies, you will still need to eat 1000-1500kcal, and these high fat foods will help you do that and stay healthy, reduce your blood sugar swings, and reduce your hunger.  

Speaking of hunger, if you get hungry, eat!  All of these foods are a good option for those hunger moments.

The Only Thing You Need To Know About Saturated Fat

What about saturated fat? It’s true that some studies show that saturated fat intake raises blood cholesterol levels. But these studies are almost always short-term, lasting only a few weeks. (5) Longer-term studies have not shown an association between saturated fat intake and blood cholesterol levels. In fact, of all of the long-term studies examining this issue, only one of them showed a clear association between saturated fat intake and cholesterol levels, and even that association was weak. (6)

Moreover, studies on low-carbohydrate diets (which tend to be high in saturated fat) suggest that they not only don’t raise blood cholesterol, they have several beneficial impacts on cardiovascular disease risk markers. For example, a meta-analysis of 17 low-carb diet trials covering 1,140 obese patients published in the journal Obesity Reviews found that low-carb diets neither increased nor decreased LDL cholesterol. However, they did find that low-carb diets were associated with significant decreases is body weight as well as improvements in several CV risk factors, including decreases in triglycerides, fasting glucose, blood pressure, body mass index, abdominal circumference, plasma insulin and c-reactive protein, as well as an increase in HDL cholesterol. (7) 

If you’re wondering whether saturated fat may contribute to heart disease in some way that isn’t related to cholesterol, a large meta-analysis of prospective studies involving close to 350,000 participants found no association between saturated fat and heart disease. (8) A Japanese prospective study that followed 58,000 men for an average of 14 years found no association between saturated fat intake and heart disease, and an inverse association between saturated fat and stroke (i.e. those who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke). (9)

http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy

Grab the steak, eggs and bacon - bon appetite! And don't forget the heavy cream for your coffee ...

Men's Health or Not, Part 3

You see an order of wings, but your endothelium sees an enemy. "Saturated fatty acids are perceived as abnormal, so the immune cells try to clean them up," says Mansoor Amiji, Ph.D., chairman of the department of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University in Boston and a researcher of treatments for endothelial dysfunction. "Instead, the cells cause more inflammation and wind up doing damage." Before you grab any packaged food off the supermarket shelf, check the label and then do a little math. Multiply the number of saturated fat grams by 9 to determine the number of calories the fat contributes. Now divide that by total calories. If saturated fat accounts for more than 10 percent of the food's calories, put the package back on the shelf.
http://www.menshealth.com/health/new-heart-threat/page/2

Another head scratcher, scientifically speaking, but one that allows for some elaboration of one of the counter intuitive points about fat in the blood vice fat in the diet.  To get more of one, you need less of the other, but not in the way you might think.

As the authors point out in the "Art and Science of Low Carb Living", it appears that fat in the blood (triglycerides and chylomicrons) are a much better predictor of disease than is fat in the diet. Counter intuitively, the best way to keep fat levels in the blood low is to avoid over-consumption of carbohydrates. Which is to say, getting more calories as fat and less as carbs can results in less fat in your blood.

"Well, Paul, please tell me how that's possible?!?!" I thought you'd never ask!

When you OD on carbs, your body gets busy stuffing the resulting blood glucose anywhere it can - it's like when company catches you by surprise and you have to find a closet for all of the crap you left lying around; think EMERGENCY!  With the help of insulin, some sugar goes to muscles with room for glycogen, some goes to top off your liver's glucose battery, but most has to be converted to fat in the liver.  This process results in production of a saturated fat which is produced as a triglyceride (three fatty acid strings bound by a sugar molecule).  The triglyceride is moved around in the blood in a VLDL boat launched from the liver.  The VLDL will dump the trigs as soon as possible and become a small, dense LDL (some folks say lots of small, dense LDL is a "high risk marker" for arterial disease, but since high levels of small dense LDL correlates with high triglycerides and low HDL, it would seem to be just another correlate with carbohydrate overdose), but since the liver is working hard to make them, the relative levels stay high.  In a high insulin environment, the body will not allow fat back out of cells and cannot make ketones from fat (thus a person eating this way chronically becomes dependent on eating carbs to make enough sugar for the brain).  It is likely that this high insulin, high fat condition in the blood is an element of leptin resistance, meaning many of the satiety loops of the body will be dis-regulated towards increased hunger.

If on the other hand you are chomping down pork rinds, salad with MCT/olive oil/vinegar dressing, veggies with butter and sirloin all day, your liver will not make any additional fat.  Instead, since your are keeping your carb intake to a tolerable amount, your body will run itself quite nicely on fat.  Some fats you eat will convert to storage (monounsaturates will, for example, as will long chain saturates), while others will go up in smoke as fuel quickly (short and medium chain saturated fats, for example, butter, coconut oil, and MCT oil).  But the body can easily store and burn fats in this kind of environment, and much of the fat is oxidized to CO2 and water very quickly.  As a result, those on a low carb, high fat diet have the lowest triglycerides - the least amount of fats in their blood - and should have the least risk of the awful sounding fate described by the Men's Health author above.

Low carb is not for everyone, and not everyone will thrive on a high animal fat diet - but MOST do and nearly all will do better in the short term than those on the SAD.  Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

"Men's Health" Or Not, Pt 2

In a wandering and not particularly useful article about endothelial disease (aka, damage to the one cell thin but very important lining of arteries), MH gives one bit of usable advice - get a test.
"The test for endothelial dysfunction isn't as simple as having your cholesterol checked, but it's no colonoscopy either. It requires a device called the EndoPAT. First, sensors attached to your fingertips monitor your normal bloodflow; then the main artery of your upper arm is restricted with a blood pressure cuff for 5 minutes. When the cuff is removed, the sensors measure the change in the amount of blood pumped with each heartbeat, an indicator of your vessels' ability to dilate. Because a computer controls the test, the technician's level of expertise doesn't affect the outcome, making the measurement exceptionally reliable, say Penn State researchers. To find a provider in your area offering the EndoPAT, visit itamar-medical.com/EndoPAT."
http://www.menshealth.com/health/new-heart-threat

Interesting side bits, the context for which the author seems not to understand -
- "the fatter your belly, the skinnier your arteries." In other words, abdominal girth is the best predictor for poor health for a number of reasons, including endothelial disfunction.  And the best way to reduce abdominal girth is carb restriction.
- mercury is bad for arteries, and omega 3 fatty acids are good.  How to get one with out the other can be a problem.  USDA recommends tilapia, sardines, catfish, salmon, and anchovies.  However, if you feed tilapia or catfish or salmon in big ponds or pens with the same rotgut you feed grain finished cattle, you won't be getting much in the way of omega 3s.  That leaves sardines, anchovies, wild caught salmon, the catfish you catch from lakes and rivers, and supplements as you means to get the omega 3s that will help balance the inevitable doses of omega 6s you get.
- lots of trans fats are left in processed foods that say "no trans fats".  Which is why you don't want to eat that crap they wrap in commercial wrappers and call "food" anyway.

Finally, MH tries to hammer on the saturated fat boogeyman - just don't fall for it.  They say there's a magic threshold of 10% of total calories which is the safe limit for sat fat consumption.  Before they should pretend to know that's true, don't you think they should first prove there's any risk whatsoever for high consumption of saturated fat?  And if it surprises you to know that no one's ever proved there's any risk whatsoever for high consumption of saturated fat, you should have been reading this blog for a longer time!  Fat is high in nutrition, provides a stable, long burning source of energy, is hormonally neutral, does not trigger blood sugar spikes, and is probably the perfect food - because it has 9 kcal per gram.  If you are going to be able to break your sugar addiction, you'll have to get comfortable eating fat, primarily saturated fat.  For most of us, our health will benefit from the shift from mostly carb calories to mostly fat calories.