Wouldn’t it be great if, when performing these after-the-fact epidemiological self-reported eating studies, someone in the UK would simply compare eating high-carb (e.g., sugary foods) with eating low-carb (with focus on meat instead)?
Why insist on lumping red meat with high sugary carbs for comparison against other eating patterns? Doesn’t the UK have a beef industry to protect?
I’ve definitely noticed this in just about every study. “Highly processed foods, sugary snacks, sweetened beverages and meat” lumped into one evil category, like meat has any resemblance at all to the others. 
They might as well add in, “cheap furniture, viruses and Satan” and really cover all the bases.
Egad:
All they really need is “refined grains, and processed foods”, and maybe sugar.
Edit. Here’s their eTable 3, supposedly giving inflammation effects. PUFAs are less inflammatory than saturated fats? Ha Ha Ha Ha…
It’s way more complex than this:
I must ask, what in the name of all things - holy and not - is that chart? Total energy calories and saffron? Carbohydrate and garlic? Alcohol and zinc? Eugenol and ginger? Did they take a vote, or just pull them out of a hat? I personally would also like to know the inflammatory index of haggis and pez.
Only one way to settle this…
Which of the following edible items do you believe has a higher inflammatory index?
0 voters
For purposes of this poll, please assume that both of the above are edible.
They tell you where they get the table, but I forget where that is.
But to have saturated fat as the MOST inflammatory item on the list…is ludicrous. From my limited knowledge of chemistry, saturated fats should be (one of) the least inflammatory item, whereas PUFAs should be one of the highest. Saturated fat should be relatively chemically inert (all hydrogens are there), whereas PUFAs have missing hydrogens, making them less stable I would think:
It’s easy to reach a faulty conclusion when you start with a faulty premise.
Your comment makes perfect sense as a straightforward distinction.
Can’t say I have any meaningful insights on this point, but perhaps there’s an alternative model that regards those “extra” (fully present) hydrogen atoms as providing a greater opportunity to be stripped out, thereby causing greater damage elsewhere in the body than their lesser- and un-saturated counterparts? 
Bob, it’s capricious, from that view, i.e. there are other things like exactly what signalling is prompted in the body, versus the ‘completeness’ or not of the molecule. Oleic acid is monounsaturated, but as its mostly found in animals and plants - its esters or oleates - like the triglycerides in olive oil (which is over 2/3 of olive oil), it’s pretty darn anti-inflammatory, if anything. There are both unsaturated and saturated fats that are more inflammatory, from what I’ve seen.
There’s one study that looks at some of this stuff. It’s heavy going… One quote:
“The compositions of the mixtures were chosen based on the expected compositions of vegetable oils and animal fat, particularly soybean oil and pork lard respectively. Oleic acid, used as a control, induced only the expression of IL-10 and IL-6, both known to possess anti-inflammatory actions, and therefore, reinforcing the alleged anti-inflammatory property of this fatty acid. Conversely, both the vegetable and the saturated fatty acid mixtures provided consistent stimuli for the expression of inflammatory cytokines, however, with the greater effect induced by the saturated mixture. When pure saturated and unsaturated fatty acids were tested separately, there was a clear difference with greatest inflammatory effect produced by long-chain saturated fatty acids.”
It is this categorisation that displays the researchers biases very very clearly. And any study that does this is at best worthless and at worst harmful. IMHO, most of these studies are at the harmful end.
Nutrition science = oxymoron.
The intro premise reads:
“The consumption of fat-rich diets is among the most important environmental factors predisposing to obesity in modern societies (Stein and Colditz, 2004; Freire et al., 2005; Moreno and Rodríguez, 2007). In animal models of genetic and diet-induced obesity, the activation of an inflammatory response in the hypothalamus leads to the molecular and functional resistance to the adipostatic hormones, leptin and insulin, resulting in a defective control of food intake and energy expenditure (Carvalheira et al., 2003; Howard et al., 2004; De Souza et al., 2005).”
But there is so much that seems contradictory to my own experience and seemingly many others here. Sat fat might be causing an inflammatory response in the hypothalamus, but it’s Not leading to overeating; leptin signalling seems fine and insulin response vastly Improved. There’s a missing piece to this puzzle for sure. (carbohydrates? Dollars to donuts if you look at the composition of the mouse chow in all of these studies …)
@OldDoug That’s an interesting study, though I’m always wary of anything that attacks long-chain saturated fats. I’ve eaten tons of long-chain saturated fats, yet my systemic inflammation (measured by HS-CRP) is (typically – it’s a spiky marker) low. Haven’t measured some of those other markers though. (Only so much money – and time – to test.)
I also rebel at testing fats separately. This is for a “serving” (3 ounces – HA!) of ribeye:
I challenge anyone to figure out what happens to anything (“cholesterol”, inflammation, etc.) based on this. Then toss in actual fatty acid content (e.g., “good” stearic acid as per lowering LDL or “bad” palmitic acid as per raising LDL), and I think we’re in a quagmire.
Then toss in highly-available vitamins and minerals, and stuff we haven’t even considered and know next to nothing about, such as different omega 3/6/9s, CLA, just so much more…, and it’s really not possible to get some number out of that.
Could you look at very narrow definitions of what happens when you eat constituent parts of something? Maybe.
But would that transfer to actual food like a ribeye? I don’t see that it could.
For me, the two foods that make me feel the best: beef; and raw milk. I don’t mind eating other meats/foods, but these are what I come back to all the time.
I KNOW with 100% certainty that beef and its “high” saturated fat is not inflammatory. In fact, I’ve purposely eaten cacao butter, with its really high palmitic acid content, and not only did my LDL go down (though there’s also stearic acid in there), but as far as I could tell, my inflammation did too.
As we all know, the way to introduce obesity in animals is to feed them a high carb diet to “finish” them for sale by weight.
Fat-rich diets for animals? The only animals I can think of that eat a fat-rich diet are carnivores like lions, tigers, etc. Lean muscle machines.
When bears need to “fatten up” for hibernation, it’s all those autumnal berries and honey they forage.
Yes, exactly. I am also skeptical of genetically induced obesity. Do we know for sure that mice genetically engineered to become obese are telling us anything about how any of this works in non-genetically predisposed animals? I mean really, if you genetically engineer a signaling pathway that causes the animal to get fat, and then you find a way to turn that off again, does it translate at all??? Conversely, if you genetically engineer some pathway to remain open no matter what, does it actually tell you anything about what your variable is doing?
Agreed. I’m all for ketogenic eating; have had its benefits myself, and I’ve never worried about saturated fats at all. But specific to inflammation, it really does not look to be as ‘intuitive’ as it may seem, even from a pro-keto, anti-seed oil stance.
And it would really be better to have a study on humans where they didn’t fool with carbs… 
Point taken, Bob - and I feel the same way. I was really just saying that we can’t “look at a molecule,” here, and predict what the body is going to do with it. In the end - if one is not suffering significant inflammation, then I don’t see that it matters what they eat, on that score. My ‘gut feeling’ would have been that “saturated fats should be less inflammatory” too, originally, but it’s come up before.
Heck - way, way before anything “keto” for me, way before I’d even heard the term, I always liked butter and really did not like (or hated) margarine, Crisco, etc.
Yet another study (yeah, Harvard!) against red meat. This time, the iron in red meat. Yes, it supposedly causes inflammation.
Woo hoo! Based on dietary reports. Those are never wrong.
No reason to suspect that those nurses who ignored all the (bogus) advice about the need to avoid red meat are naysayers … also the same nurses who ignored other advice about good eating, health, and exercise habits over the past 36 years?
Let’s construct a study comparing…
Associations revealed:
Also, for the first category, wealth plays a role. That is, in order to take yoga, you’re not a single mother with 3 kids or the like. Gary Taubes had a discussion of one of these long-term studies (the nurses one I think). The idea was that nurses were generally the same in terms of wealth. But they never actually look at that. Say you’re a nurse living in a city and your significant other is a doctor or lawyer. Compare that with a nurse in nowhere Massachusetts who has kids and is divorced. Nurses aren’t monolithic, and these studies should make an attempt to determine how wealth affects this, but they don’t.
