It has been hard watching the morning news during American Heart month and seeing them recommend all these supposed “heart healthy” foods like margarine and low-fat yogurt with granola. This morning a cardiologist mentioned a study that shows replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat or carbohydrates will reduce mortality rates. Does anyone anythoughts about this?
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2530902
A very important quote from the article linked is - “However, evidence on specific dietary fat and mortality remains limited and inconsistent”, so I’m not sure if they even agree with their own conclusions. And given that the study was still done on people eating carbohydrates in significant quantities and only reporting their dietary habits via questionnaires always calls into question the validity of the results because there are too many variables in play and often these studies can be reinterpreted in such a way that sugar and carbs have a higher correlation with mortality, but it’s their preconceived notion that saturated fats are evil.
Dr. Cate Shanahan has done a great job debunking the “benefits” of unsaturated fats like polyunsaturated vegetable oils in the video below and her book Deep Nutrition.
All that being said, even Dr. Stephen Phinney and Dr. Jeff Volek acknowledge that saturated fats behave differently in carb eaters than those eating LCHF/keto, so at the very least the study would demonstrate this and doesn’t translate into the same mortality risks for those of us eating ketogenically.
In other words, when eating carbs, the body is forced to use them as fuel in order to avoid raising blood glucose to dangerous levels otherwise triggering the destruction of vital proteins through the creation of Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs) and this leaves saturated fats lying around and not getting burned as a fuel source like they are for someone on a ketogenic diet.
Something I find a bit weird: replacing with monounsaturated fats, specifically ‘marine Omega-3’ (so, should be mostly DHA) , had less of a beneficial impact than replacement with PUFAs.
As already mentioned, there are a lot of compounding factors here, but I would still have expected a greater benefit from MUFAs. It’s possible that their comparative benefits should be re-evaluated (on my side).
“associations of…”, I see.
“oh good”, I think, “I don’t need to bother reading the rest of this dime-a-dozen tendentious-to-the-banal-mean maths- torture of the poor old Nurses’ Health Study, and can go guzzle some whipped cream and macadamia nuts instead”.
A reminder: dangerous misinterpretation of the Nurses’ Health Study also led to the disastrous mis-recommendation of HRT to millions of women.
Bill, did you read the full text? Were the saturated fats AND carbs high? Or crazy out of proportion?
Interested on how the whole thing was spun.
Thanks, Megan, for posting. Piqued my interest, so I went to JAMA and found another few studies on the subject of attempting to promote linoleic acid and PUFAs as increasing longevity. Not going to spend a lot of time on it today, but I’d suspect there’s a bit more research eager to find a way to salvage their darling high PUFA diet.
Here’s just one I found:
They conclude that “Dietary polyunsaturated and more specifically linoleic fatty acid intake may have a substantial cardioprotective benefit that is also reflected in overall mortality.”
(Italics and bold mine)
While I love science and am eager to see new discovery (with all the exciting challenges and subtleties along the way), it seems to me that the vast weight of the science of the past 150 (at least) years leans unquestionably, heavily toward LCHF, and it stretches my imagination to believe that anything substantial will ever come out to contradict it.
I used to get really silly worked up over studies, until I read books like Good Calories, Bad Calories, and The Big Fat Surprise, and then I realized, of course, that it’s never so simple as publishing a study and promoting it. There’s a lot more buried in the text and behind the scenes. Taubes, and Teicholz (and many others) have done superhuman feats of historical research that convinces me, for one, that there’s so much more than at first meets the eye.
Besides the historical, the ongoing work of scientists like Thomas Seyfried and Dom D’Agostino just drive it home for me that the Ketogenic lifestyle is not just where we’ve come from as a species, but also where we’re going. Whoever’s not on the train is going to get left behind.
I’ve read Good Calories, Bad Calories and I’m actually reading The Big Fat Surprise right now. It’s really surprising how much bad information is condensed into one sentence such as, “Dietary Fat causes heart attacks”. The American public shouldn’t have to sift through studies to find the truth. Thank goodness for Taubes and Teicholz.
I thought for years that my father was very healthy. He actually lost a lot of weight with a low fat diet and exercise and had kept it off but has had a couple seizures recently. It really scares me that he might be TOFI.
Have there been any true LCHF studies out there I can show him?
Their data is difficult to trust, it is all self reported. I am in the the nurses health study, every couple of years we get a questionnaire that asks about medical conditions and whether they were newly diagnosed. They also ask about diet—in the last year, how many times a week did you eat_______. First, how do you remember what you ate 6 months ago, second, it’s human nature to report that you eat better than you do. There are probably at least a few that are keto, but they probably won’t recognize it.
Thanks Karen! It’s interesting to talk to someone that is actually in the Nurses Study.
HRT is useful for some women, but it can also cause problems (like increase in cardiovascular incidents); however, when researchers looked at data from the Nurses’ Health Study, which just looked at lots and lots of nurses, observed what they did and tried to crunch the maths to figure out how they got on, those researchers thought they caught something: women who took HRT were generally much healthier than women who didn’t.
“Ah ha!”, they thought, “these women are being made really healthy by their HRT! We should tell all women to take it immediately!”
Sadly, they mistook cause from effect. What this really showed was that women who looked after themselves, who ate well, who exercised and had time to think about their health ALSO happened to be women who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink too much, exercised, heeded their doctors more carefully, looked at the latest treatments available - one of which was HRT! After all, plenty of these women who took HRT were doing so such that the HRT could help them to continue their active, healthy lifestyles. Women who were prepared to settle for the sofa and some cigarettes were less interested in such treatments.
So it wasn’t that HRT was making these superwomen healthy: it was that their general healthy attitudes were leading them to be early adopters of HRT. And, indeed, they were such a healthy bunch that their high health hid the fact that HRT, given to women at large and indiscriminately, actually could cause health problems, particular ones to do with heart incidents.
When proper intervention studies were done on HRT, the effects became clear - those Nurses had led to the opposite conclusion that should have been, and women should not have been told to take HRT indiscriminately as, for a while, they had been. It’s been calculated that this bad, broad-brush advice based on flawed studies like the Nurses’ Health, led to the death of thousands of women prematurely. So this stuff matters!
The moral of the story is: if you only have epidemiological, observational data, which mixes millions of variables, and you can’t tell cause from effect, it’s not just pseudoscience, it’s DANGEROUS PSEUDOSCIENCE to draw any firm conclusion. Remember that next time someone tells you red meat gives you cancer or any other such nonsense too!
If you want to read a more detailed summary, have a look at this link:
HRT and study bias
This is shockingly common. Yet, the general public and the media repeat anything said by a “scientist” as fact. Gary Taubes famously reported that when he was coming up, he was told that only 5% or so of researchers actually know what they are doing and produce meaningful data. He suggests that the number has likely not grown since then.
So true. It amazes me that the very same people who will say “anecdotes are not data” will swallow a questionnaire-based cohort study as gospel truth.
Thanks. I’ll look into this. Several years ago, I read Dr. Diana Schwarzbein’s books and her in depth scientific findings that are incredibly similar to what Carl and Richard are reporting regarding insulin, adrenals, and metabolism. Although she doesn’t recommend a ketogenic approach, she did reverse T2 diabetes in many of her patients and this was many years ago. She eschews low fat, high carb diets and talks in depth about damaged and undamaged fats. It all made sense to me at the time, but I couldn’t find a doctor to test my blood the way it needed to be done for years. Dr. Schwarzbein recommends five steps to healing your metabolism, i.e., insulin and adrenals. You address each one in order before going on to the next. 1. Healthy nutrition, 2. Stress management (including sleep), 3. Getting off toxic chemicals (drugs), 4. Moderate exercise and 5. HRT, if needed. She is a big proponent of doing the first four things before HRT. I only started HRT a couple years ago and it has helped a lot. Granted, my first HRT prescriber, tended to increase my doses at the least hint of my symptoms not being where he thought they should be. I have since switched to another provider who is doing the right tests to check my body’s reaction and need for them and have decreased most of them by more than half.
I have been wondering if eating Keto will allow me to get off all of the HRT, but I’m still not sure. After learning from Dr. Schwarzbein that there are circumstances under which you should be supplementing with them, I just don’t know. She’s very careful about who should take them and how much, etc. So this is the route I’ve been taking. I’ll continue to look into getting off them as I continue a keto lifestyle. Thanks for the info.
I’ve read them too and her insights as an endocrinologist are great. I often refer to her when someone who’s damaged their metabolism for years, or decades, suddenly gets frustrated when keto doesn’t fix all their problems in days, weeks or even a couple of months. She even makes it clear that when you finally start eating according to your body’s needs, the healing process may even cause you to gain substantial quantities of weight, whether that is in new lean body mass or bodyfat.
Prof Tim Noakes likes to point out that 50% of research studies are false, although we don’t know which 50%. I think this was based on an actual survey of association studies (like this one) which were followed up by random controlled trials. The RCTs disproved half of the association studies.
No surprise here. Study populations can be too small, associations can be weak, other factors can affect things, oh and there can be CONFLICTS OF INTEREST.
It sounds like you’re doing it right: carefully targeting all your health markers and seeking true wellness, and tuning it with HRT. Similar to what the healthy nurses did.
The problem was when HRT was given willy nilly to women who already had so many risk markers, as if it’d be the fountain of youth and solve all the problems on its own. With the predictable results that usually happen when the silver bullet is the only ammo you can think of!
That makes sense. And makes me feel better about what I’m doing. Thanks for your information.
I’m still trying to get to a great place with Keto. I’m still suffering a lot of fatigue and brain fog. No energy or motivation, so I keep reading about others experiences hoping that I will see some of those same results sooner than later. And trying to get tips to make it happen sooner. It can be frustrating. I’m never tempted to cheat as I’ve eaten primal for 4 years, but it would be nice to have more energy, clear thinking, motivation and strength. Oh. And I’d like to lose the last 20 too.
I’m still waiting to get more energy, motivation and strength. And to stop feeling so TIRED all the time. I don’t feel much different than when I started eating Keto on January 14, though, so I don’t have anything to lose by continuing eating this way. (Except the last 20 lbs). I lost 40 about 6 months ago eating primal blueprint but that took years to finally kick in. I needed someone to remind me that my body is still healing. So thanks for that.
Reading and hearing about people getting superhuman strength, stamina and energy, eating Keto, is one of the main reasons I’m doing it. And I like results. So it’s annoying to have to wait for them.