
Study: Doubling Saturated Fat in the Diet Does Not Increase It in Blood - adventured
http://news.osu.edu/news/2014/11/21/study-doubling-saturated-fat-in-the-diet-does-not-increase-saturated-fat-in-blood/
======
SoftwareMaven
We've known for a while the risk factor for heart disease is serum SFA levels,
not necessarily SFA consumption. What has never been shown is that consuming
SFA raises serum SFA; instead, it's been an understood truism held in place by
policy and demagoguery. This study is small, but evidence convicting saturated
fats was extremely weak to begin with, and we are now seeing positive evidence
exonerating it.

If you are interested in learning more about the history of nutrition, I
highly recommend Nina Teicholz book The Big Fat Surprise. As others have
mentioned, Phinney and Volek's books are a great overview off the science as
of a few years ago. Phinney has been doing research on this for 40 years,
quite an accomplishment, given how hard it has been to get funding for
research that contradicts the policy line of "carbs are critical to survival
and fat must be avoided".

~~~
deepsun
Well, originally thought was valid. If we eat something, there must be more of
it in body. Of course, now we see that body is more complicated in case of
SFA, but generally assumption works for other cases.

If a cat entered a house, you generally might expect that cat should be inside
the house. The reality, as we see, is more complex than that, but generally
assumption works, and worked for most of the cases.

I just want to say that please don't blame scientists and policy makers.
Everyone's smart after the fact.

~~~
mikeash
If you eat a cat, do you then contain a cat? No, you contain products of
digesting a cat. The supposed cause/effect looks like magical thinking in
hindsight.

~~~
jere
I think the original analogy refutes itself. If a strange cat enters your
house, you remove it. Likewise, the human body has plenty of methods for
regulating fats, sugars, sodium, etc. Of course, you can overwhelm those
regulatory methods, but in general the assumption that there's a linear
relationship between what you consume and the chronic levels seems pretty
naive.

~~~
mtdewcmu
\-- and if multiple strange cats enter your house, you start to think about
closing the door.

Interesting that you mention sodium. I've wondered whether the common advice
to restrict sodium to reduce blood pressure actually has any effect. It would
only work if your kidneys were not effectively regulating your blood sodium.

~~~
j_lev
[http://www.marksdailyapple.com/salt-what-is-it-good-
for/](http://www.marksdailyapple.com/salt-what-is-it-good-for/)

According to this (there's a study linked within) salt's effect on blood
pressure and other indicators of heart disease seem to follow a j-curve - too
little or too much and you're at increased risk.

~~~
mtdewcmu
The conclusions in there are clear as mud... :)

------
justin66
One interesting thing to note is that the title _Doubling Saturated Fat in the
Diet Does Not Increase Saturated Fat in Blood_ does not logically contradict
the notion that radically reducing saturated fat in the diet decreases
saturated fat in blood. It's possible that once you reach a certain
consumption point you're doing as much as you can do.

I'd want to read the study in detail before commenting further. I'm a little
surprised they started with people with metabolic syndrome, which could mean a
lot of things and lead to a lot of craziness.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Unfortunately, it's probably not too much of a stretch to think metabolically
disordered people may outnumber those who aren't, if not now, then soon. But,
realistically, it was probably necessary to target sick people to get the
grant.

------
elsewhen
not that this negates the finding of the article, but i think it is important
to highlight that: "This work was supported by the Dairy Research Institute,
the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Egg Nutrition Center."

~~~
judk
Wow that's a coalitiion against plant dieting

------
hachiya
I would be very careful about taking anything in this study at face value. Be
sure to look at available responses before taking advice from the Atkins, Inc.
folks.

e.g. [http://carbsanity.blogspot.com/2014/11/that-new-volek-
phinne...](http://carbsanity.blogspot.com/2014/11/that-new-volek-phinney-
study-part-i.html)

 _Palmitoleic acid is a MUFA and while it may be true that it can act as a
biomarker, there is an insanely huge amount of research against there being
any direct deleterious mechanism of action for this fatty acid. To the
contrary, palmitoleic acid is often shown to have protective, insulin
sensitizing effects. More on that later, but come on. How can you write that
when even perusing Wikipedia should cause pause!_

 _But let me ask you this. When was the last time you heard that saturated fat
caused an increase in the saturated fat circulating in your blood and that
THIS was the cause of heart disease? Answer: Never!_

------
mipapage
Two of the authors, Phinny and Volek, have some interesting books out on
living in a low carb lifestyle.

------
MrQuincle
It would be quite surprising. I concur with @elsewhen that the people funding
this research must have been quite pleasantly surprised: "This work was funded
by a grant from Dairy Research Institute, The Beef Checkoff, the Egg Nutrition
Center, and the Robert C. And Veronica Atkins Foundation."

I've been reading through it on
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0113605)
and I don't understand several things:

* Which SFAs (Saturated Fatty Acids) have been gone up in plasma by a carbohydrate diet? Only palmitoleic acid, or also other ones? And what's the percentage of these acids compared to all SFAs?

* If you only check people with metabolic syndrome are the results not typical of a metabolism which is screwed up? Don't you at least wanna know what it does in healthy people?

* If there is momentarily plasma palmitoleic acid response on dietary intake of carbohydrates, are those SFAs there so the body can get rid of them? What's the mechanism here? If you want to loose fat, it will need to go through the plasma at some time...

------
joelthelion
... in 16 adults.

~~~
bluecalm
16 adults is quite good. If you polled them well (that is randomly) and you
obtained some result in all of them then it's significant evidence that that
the result is true for very significant part of the population.

Sure, you can't show that it's true for everybody but having a result like:
"only 0.1% chance that it occurred by random if 2/3 of the population reacts
this way and way less if it's half of the population" is very nice result to
have.

If something occurs for 16 randomly chosen people (or even 15/16 or 14/16) you
are virtually certain it occurs for very significant part of the population
which is often the goal of the study - to justify further research.

~~~
icebraining
_If you polled them well (that is randomly)_

It's not random. They were "sixteen overweight/obese men and women 30-66 years
old, with a BMI between 27–50 kg/m2".

~~~
DanBC
How important is it that this study had no control (and thus no randomisation
or blinding) and had a small sample size, and that some of the authors have
written books about this diet?

~~~
scholia
What would a control group have added? If you boil water in a beaker, do you
need a control beaker where you monitor the temperature but don't light the
Bunsen burner?

Also, how would you run a double-blind test of the foods people are eating?
It's pretty hard to disguise steaks ;-)

Most nutritional studies are observational, so the numbers are not very
reliable. In this case, "subjects were provided with all food for 18 wk, which
was prepared and packaged by staff in our research kitchen." That's one reason
why the numbers were so small, though it would have been better if they'd been
bigger.

The most reliable evidence would come from controlling what people ate and
what they did. I'd have thought this would be something that could be done
with volunteer prisoners.

~~~
joshgel
Controls are always essential in this type of research. Placebo effects
abound. Maybe the people knew they were on an increased fat diet and so
exercised more?

~~~
scholia
I'm all in favor of controls, in general. But how exactly would a control help
in this specific case? How would it work?

------
apetresc
Whatever, I give it at most two years before some other study directly
contradicts this one (just as this one directly contradicts conventional
wisdom based on other studies which themselves contradicted the generally-
accepted status quo before them).

Nutritional science is just insane.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I would take that bet. Phinney and Volek have a long history of doing pretty
good science. I haven't seen any of their work directly contradicted over
Phinney's 35+ year career[0]. Also, there is scant evidence that this is
actually showing a different result than other studies. The diet-heart
hypothesis never had good, controlled studies[1] to back it up; we are just
now seeing the good science testing it, and it's not holding up well.

I will agree that nutrition science has been, and, in many cases, continues to
be, lacking. It is getting better, though. We are moving past epidemiology
being the be-all-end-all and starting to see well controlled trials asking
interesting questions. Unfortunately, those are really expensive and hard to
do.

0\. I could be wrong here; I've read a lot but not everything. Still, they've
had enough detractors that I'm sure people would have trumpeted it.

1\. Lots of epidemiological studies, but causation shouldn't have ever been
inferred from them. Unlike with smoking, risk factors were never 20x, more
like 1.2x.

------
buzz27
Well, the sample is quite small, and just because a measure of fats in blood
did not increase, it is probably not justified to conclude that a high intake
is safe.

~~~
17425170
We've been running some basic experiments that suggest the opposite to these
findings: [http://hema.vu/1vA0sHR](http://hema.vu/1vA0sHR) . But again, this
is hardly conclusive (our sample size is much smaller).

~~~
volker48
Your experiment doesn't really look like the same thing at all. From your
link, it doesn't look like you are controlling carbohydrates and your
participants are just eating lots of fast food. The study started with low
carb high saturated fat. I would argue that fast food is high carb and high
fat. Interesting research though either way.

------
GIFtheory
I'd like to point out that the linked article links to its own blog about 20
times, but not once to the actual study, which is here:
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0113605).
Epic.

~~~
dang
That url
([http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/285915.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/285915.php))
also appeared to rip content from the original popular article, which we found
by googling one of the quotes from the study author.

There is a class of poor-quality science blogs that mostly lift content from
elsewhere. We mostly don't ban them, because occasionally they do end up being
the best popular article on a study. We do, however, penalize them.

