NY Times
 

SHE'S BACK, flattering Taubes with the title

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/...s-bad-fats.html


Good Fats, Bad Fats

Personal Health

By JANE E. BRODY JAN. 29, 2018

The media love contrarian man-bites-dog stories that purport to debunk long-established beliefs and advice. Among the most popular on the health front are reports that saturated fats do not cause heart disease and that the vegetable oils we’ve been encouraged to use instead may actually promote it.

But the best-established facts on dietary fats say otherwise. How well polyunsaturated vegetable oils hold up health-wise when matched against saturated fats like butter, beef fat, lard and even coconut oil depends on the quality, size and length of the studies and what foods are eaten when fewer saturated fats are consumed.

So before you succumb to wishful thinking that you can eat well-marbled steaks, pork ribs and full-fat dairy products with abandon, you’d be wise to consider the findings of what is probably the most comprehensive, commercially untainted review of the dietary fat literature yet published. They are found in a 26-page advisory prepared for the American Heart Association and published last June by a team of experts led by Dr. Frank M. Sacks, professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The report helps to explain why the decades-long campaign to curb cardiovascular disease by steering the American diet away from animal fats has been less successful than it might have been and how it inadvertently promoted expanding waistlines and an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes.

When people cut back on a particular nutrient, they usually replace it with something else to maintain their needed caloric input. Unfortunately, in too many cases, saturated fats — and fats in general — gave way to refined carbohydrates and sugars, the so-called SnackWell phenomenon that prompted fat-wary eaters to overindulge in high-calorie, low-nutrient foods.

Brody doesn't cite the report she hints at in the first paragraph. It's only fair to do this so we can actually get the whole context. On the other hand, she does title her article suggestively, ya? So, it must be all about Taubes again and his recent BMJ essay 2018-1-8. Besides the fact she doesn't cite it by name or at all, she calls it a report (which it is not) when it's called an essay (which it is) right on top of the page. Tks tks, misleading the reader are ya, Jane? Omission of citation and mischaracterization? Who knows, the reader might conclude the journalist isn't actually a professional, but merely an amateur. I wonder what character Brody would assign to her own text. Is it a report or is it an essay, hm? Methinks there's a whole lot of opinion in there and scant facts if any.

What if it's a rebut to Taubes and Teicholz op-ed of 2018-1-28? That would have given Jane a whole 24 hours to write hers. Methinks that's a whole day of preparation. Here's what I think. She wrote it well in advance (she had six months to mull over Sacks' advisory, ahem I mean AHA PRESIDENTIAL ADVISORY, published 2017-6-15), but simply tacked on a vague-yet-toothy first paragraph to fit the current hot potato.

Here's what Tom had to say about that only a few days after publication: The American Heart Association Bravely Admits They’ve Been Right All Along … Part Two

I wouldn't call those natural vegetable oils, unless they're still in their natural form - as in the whole corn kernel, the whole soybean, the whole safflower, sunflower, peanut, walnut, grape, and pods of canola (brassica/mustard?) seeds. I can't imagine any circumstances under which I'd willingly eat a whole safflower (thistle), an entire mustard seed pod, or crunch up the seeds of a grape in my mouth in order to get some natural vegetable oils. The corn and soybean are mostly carbs, so I don't want to eat those whole either to get my "natural" vegetable oils. Whole sunflower seeds, peanuts and walnuts, perhaps, but I really don't care for peanuts, so I guess that leaves me with sunflower seeds, walnuts and olive oil.

How many sunflower seeds will I need to eat to get a "healthy" amount of sunflower oil?

There's a saying about fast, cheap or good, choose two. The long studies with large cohorts tend to be low in quality, if it's not epidemiology, by nature uncontrolled, then it's interventions that are large and unwieldy and prohibitively expensive to properly control.

I'm actually not that convinced that polyunsaturated fats are all that bad either, I mostly eat animal source fats because they taste better.

Hate to be one of those people who quotes myself, but had another thought on the desirability of "natural" vegetable oils.

It's not just that none of those vegetable oils are in their natural form. If those are such natural oils, then why do they need to be industrially refined from their natural state in order to be used in our diet?

How many bushels of corn does it take to make a quart of corn oil? How about canola oil - how many bushels of those teensy-tiny seeds does it take to produce a quart of oil? How many bushels of grapes would you need to pick to finally get enough grape seeds to produce a quart of grape seed oil? (I'm thinking you'd probably feel the need to drink all the wine produced from all those grapes just to deal with how many seeds you'd need to extract from the grapes)

Then let's consider what kinds of very unnatural processing the seeds of grapes, thistles, mustard, etc need to go through, with an assortment of very unnatural chemicals, in order to extract and refine those "natural" oils?

How can anyone call them natural oils after all that?

By comparison, what needs to be done to milk to produce cream, butter or cheese? Mostly, just milk the cow, then if you want cream, skim the cream off the milk. If you want butter, churn the cream you skimmed off the milk. If you want cheese, take the whole milk, allow it to curdle, drain off the whey.

How about beef fats, pork fats, and other meat fats? No refining necessary for any of those either. All you need to do is butcher the animal and cook it. During the cooking process, some of the fats will drip off, the rest will remain to be eaten with the meat. If you want pure fat for cooking, you simply cut off fatty tissue and cook that separately to render the fats. No extraction chemicals or refining necessary.

Somehow this worked to sustain humankind for thousands of years, and those who didn't succumb to infection, contagious disease, or accident might actually die from heart disease when they were very old. And yet it has been decided that diet isn't good enough for us now.

Utterly ridiculous.

I agree Calianna. The process of extracting oil from seeds convinces me that I don't want to eat them. I figure that the less processing that has to be done to produce an edible substance the better off we are. All the science in the world won't convince me otherwise. Natural fats don't need complicated chemical extraction, a very unnatural process. It's not that all "natural" substances are good for you. Clearly some are not but if they were part of an ancestral diet then I trust them to be a good choice.

Jean

It took me YEARS to learn this. I never knew about the refining process until a cheese maker I know mentioned it. Then the light bulb went off. It's odd, too, that the makers don't brag about the nitty-gritty of the refining, about what really happens. If it's so natural, you'd think they would.