Disappointed in certain authors

(Bob M) #1

I’ve been reading a book called The Autoimmune Brain, because our daughter has a disease that causes brain inflammation and autoimmunity. I decide to read the section on nutrition. Probably a mistake. Note that this doctor is highly regarded in the area where my daughter has her issues.

The author makes the statement “Diets that are high in saturated fats negatively affect brain functions and increase the risk of neurological diseases.” Page 109 of the version I have. And I say to myself, “What?”.

For this statement, he cites to this reference:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197458014003558?via%3Dihub

The first-listed author is Neal D. Barnard. I don’t even have to read the study to know that that author will do anything possible to make meat look bad.

It’s a “review”, so they were trying to gather many studies to make a conclusion. There are so many problems with this “study”. They only used 12 studies, and ALL of them were based on “prospective” studies using FFQs (food frequency questionnaires). Right there, I find this disqualifying:

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This is the kind of garbage they are using:
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What this means is that they gave someone a FFQ, then followed them … for up to 21 years. And in that time, assuming they ate exactly the same thing.

And these are all the caveats and conflicts:

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I’m not sure where to start. If there are some prospective studies that do not indicate a relationship between saturated and trans fat intake and the risk of cognitive problems, how can one say these are causative? And what do saturated fats have to do with trans fats? Why are they lumped together?

And this is a paragraph where they are laying out the possible mechanisms by which “saturated fats” could cause dementia:

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Saturated fat causes glucose toxicity? Ah, what?

I look at this study and say it’s complete crap. Because it is complete crap. Yet one of the premier doctors about inflammation and autoimmunity is hoodwinked into believing this garbage, or perhaps never looked at the study and just believes this because it’s what everyone believes?

I am disappointed.

Anyone else analyze a book’s nutrition info and get disappointed?

#2

I can relate :smiley: I am interested so I do these things… It’s not nice but something compels me to act like that…

I don’t care about studies, humans are very familiar with eating lots of saturated fat and they were fine (or if not, it wasn’t due to it but starvation or something)… My anchestors and I ate lots of saturated fat in the last hundreds of years but surely before that too. Hungarians eat lots of saturated fat and our brain isn’t worse than the brain of people who eat less… French eat lots of it too, right? I am all for research and studies if they are done well but until there are enough with a big N, we can use these thinking, just looking at countries eating lots of saturated fat.

nods It’s like saturated fat/red meat causing diabetes/heart problems, I don’t know the specifics of these things, I suspect my brain deletes the info whenever it reaches me.
It never made any sense to me. And my decisions can’t change as no way in hell I will stop eating lots of saturated fat, I did it all my life, impossible to stop especially without any reason. I rather follow my body, it gives me great feedback. Hungarians get fat and sick in too big numbers but I blame the carbs and to some extent, modern bad ingredients and other, not food related modern problems (and old ones like stress, it surely doesn’t help) for it, the smallest factor of them is worse than eating fatty pork if you ask me.

(Central Florida Bob ) #3

That study may be the worst pile of crap ever assembled. At least, I hope it’s the worst and not just typical of the field. They should just acknowledge that all their “may, might, could…” and all the other weasel words are worse than usual.

#4

All the time! :rofl: I’m so used to the b.s. studies now but it still affects me like fingernails on a chalkboard.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #5

Seems I (and maybe we) live in an alternate reality where everything we do has the opposite effect to the accepted norm.

(Joey) #6

@ctviggen Sadly, I see a lot of dribble - poorly constructed, correlation vs causation, garbage metrics, relative risk vs absolute risk reporting, etc. etc. So much of it is trash in the field of nutrition and dietary health.

I’m so sorry to hear your daughter has a condition that needs special attention and the so-called experts’ expertise is not always very learned. She’s lucky to have you as her loving father doing some basic legwork to better understand what’s really what.

There are a number of excellent books by Gerd Gigerenzer, all of which are worth reading, but one in particular comes to mind given your post…

“Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You”

At the time he wrote it he served as the leader of the Max Planck Institute. He takes apart study after study, including the effect of false positives and false negatives in common medical testing and “expert” guidance. Might be of interest.

#7

I’m afraid this will only get worse,meat is being targeted at government levels now.

I’m trying not to care,personally. Live in my own bubble,let others live how they like.

I wish I could save The World but I can’t.

(Bob M) #8

Thanks, all. I added that book to my Amazon cart. I have a few books to read/finish, but I’ll get that one and read it afterwards.

I just got done spending time with the extended family, and this anti-saturated-fat bias is so pervasive. Everyone still believes that saturated fat (and salt) are bad for you. One of them uses an app that rates food and gives it a score. Some of the info it tells you is interesting, looking at the chemicals in food. But then it freaks out about salt and saturated fat, neither of which is that much of a problem. One of the people watches her salt intake due to higher blood sugar, and it’s not salt intake that’s causing the high blood sugar, it’s a high insulin level due to eating tons of carbs.

And for Dr. Barnard and similar, they equate saturated fat with animals, then build a fake causal chain: high saturated fat diet = diabetes = dementia (or cancer or heart disease or whatever).

I heard a biome researcher on The Metabolic Mind podcast talking about hamburgers and a normal fast-food meal in the US, and he specifically discussed “high saturated fat” diets. Yet, I look at a burger, fries, and a drink, and I think that’s a low saturated fat, high polyunsaturated fat (PUFA), high sugar diet. Beef, for instance, is highest in monounsaturated fat, not saturated fat, and the oils they use for the fires are high in PUFAs. For burger/fries/drink, you’re looking at a paltry amount of saturated fat. It’s only a “high” saturated fat diet if you’re comparing it with a plant-based diet without coconuts. And even then, it’s relative, as if you’re eating any oils, they have saturated fats in them too, even that magical elixir of olive oil.

Anyway, I was hoping to see the ketogenic diet or carnivore diet being at least mentioned, but they weren’t.

(KM) #9

It’s really amazing. You cannot, in any company of ordinary people, mention the idea that saturated fat is not a problem, without getting pushback and pitying looks from at least half of them. It’s going to take another three decades to get this out of the common knowledge pool, and that’s only if the ‘trusted’ media sources pumping out this nonsense suddenly cease. It’s not possible to go a day without hearing it.

#10

I don’t notice people fear red meat, saturated fat or salt here but sadly, it appeared in media in recent years… And there must have been some reason to make people to use sunflower oil decades ago, that was highly successful. Of course people still use lard for pork dishes and stuff (at least I hope so… or some other animal fat if it works for them… I prefer the right animal fat for meat dishes - except ruminant meat as my SO and I both hate the taste of tallow) but otherwise… :frowning:

My SO just appeared behind me and asks how does it work… The food contains what he puts into it, how to look it up? Not like either of us would care, of course. That stupid ABCDE rating started to get more prevalent here, I think… I see it more often now but as most of my food (for weight/volume, not type of food) doesn’t even have an ingredient list, I am a bit out of touch with these things… My processed stuff doesn’t have it.

(Cathy) #11

Human nutritional studies are the worst. Gary Taubes presented an excellent case for why that is in his book Good Calories/Bad Calories (unfortunate name which he does address outside of that book).

I use to try to convince others of this fact but gave up over time and decided I could only be advocate through example. So that’s what I do.

(Joey) #12

Got me wondering if the fat % in the beef has something to do with this. Apparently it does…

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… although it looks like its a close call across the spectrum.

[Source: https://www.nutritionadvance.com/ground-beef-nutrition-facts/]

(Alec) #13

This. And this is why you should never trust an expert outside their immediate area of expertise. This bloke might know about the brain and inflammation, but he is not an expert in what causes it. He is trusting other “experts” to tell him that.

Experts believe other experts. It’s a kind of bother/sisterhood. And it leads to all kinds of nonsense.

And it is clear that doctors in general have no idea about the basics of research and the relative strengths of various types of evidence. In my view, doctors are useful idiots: pawns being used by the medical establishment and Big Pharma. I am not a subscriber to the darker conspiracy theories about population control, but I am veering in that direction.

#14

Natural food often contains a significant percentage from both saturated and unsaturated fats so I find it super weird to avoid one of them, it’s pretty much impossible for me to begin with… But as they are normal food for humans, I never doubted them either. Eggs, meat, oily seeds… They have both galore!

I googled a bit and have found a Hungarian site about why is so good saturated fats and fatty meats are :smiley: Of course, we shouldn’t overdo it but the guidelines don’t tend to practice moderation when it comes to scaring people off and that’s very wrong. If I ate little fat (nope, wouldn’t happen by my own will…), I obviously would eat more carbs (as the fat I like isn’t mostly unsaturated) and that wouldn’t be good for anyone except some parts of food industry… (Potentially a tiny bit for Big Pharma but I like to avoid medicine and have good genes so probably not that.) I just don’t get why people don’t look at the world and see saturated fat isn’t a huge enemy or at least that some people need fat as their main energy source… Because saturated fat is one thing, but they always want us to eat low fat nowadays and it makes no sense. I NEED high fat, always did. It wasn’t pretty on high-carb. If I want to minimize my fat intake, I need to do carnivore. Maybe I am a snowflake and guidelines are for normal people (but they are still very off even then. my SO couldn’t follow them either, he would be sick).

So I still don’t think we need extensive studies to see it’s stupid to try force the masses into some closed-minded specific diet…

(Alec) #15

Whhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaattttttttttttttttt??? I have never heard of anyone trying to control their high blood sugar by limiting salt…. That’s the dumbest thing I have heard in a while…. Amazing anyone actually believes that. Did they explain the logic at all?

(Joey) #16

Well, okay, here’s the logic: They’re both white small grainy crystals… hard to tell the difference just by looking… and controlling one’s intake of sweets is a lot harder for many folks than controlling their salt… so, I guess there’s that. :roll_eyes:

(KM) #17

Gary Taubes has a rather wordy substack post that makes some excellent points about journalism. https://open.substack.com/pub/uncertaintyprinciples/p/bad-health-journalism-an-addendum?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3m3bbw

“Among the consequences of writing about the problematic state of health reporting is that it will prompt readers to ask about other articles they have recently read. This article, for instance, from The Atlantic—“America Stopped Cooking with Tallow for a Reason”—raised a host of issues I had not even begun to discuss.” …

(B Creighton) #18

We have been fed garbage studies for years - decades actually… perhaps beginning with Ancel Keys’ 7 countries study, which wasn’t even his… When I found this out some 2 decades ago, I threw out any seed oils I had, and went and bought some coconut oil and EVOO for cooking - fortunately, I had been using butter all along, and refused to buy margarines. The food industry are pros at getting garbage studies… need I say more?

#19

Greetings from Santa!

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(Alec) #20

350g of red meat per person per week??? They have GOT to be joking… I eat twice that much at each meal!! :joy::joy::joy::man_shrugging:. The difference is… I don’t eat anything else… that meat is my energy source.