dagblog - Comments for "Butter is bad – a myth we've been fed by the 'healthy eating' industry"

The downside to this story is

artappraiser — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 01:45:49 +0000

The downside to this story is that he developed iatrogenic parkinsons and that is what he ultimately died from.

Nothing you could tell me would serve better than that to let me know that you are someone who understands the current state of the medical industrial complex. Seems sometimes like First, do no harm really means nothing anymore, it's become something that impossible to achieve. Once you have chronic whatever, they will do many things that current science says will help and then find out later what they did causes something else, maybe worse, maybe not. If nothing else, after several years of ministering by the complex, your kidneys will fail from all the meds and treatments.

On "trans fats" et. al., I have been noticing that in more nuanced research circles, they are following thoughts along these lines:

“Different types of saturated fats behave differently.” quote from a non-profit Dietician Association, from a NYT article "Once a Villain, Coconut Oil Charms the Health Food World."

But the F.D.A. rarely gets into nuance.

Best advice I ever read on this was in more than one wholistic medicine book I read decades ago: just stay away from the hydrogenation process with fats. Any cold pressed (that is, pressed out the old fashioned way in an actual press) fat in moderation is good food. That all this current excitement over olive oil is folly, that olive fat is no better than a lot of other fats. It's just that it is almost always cold pressed. That hydrogenation is the main culprit, changing the molecular structure into frankenfood. To just look for "cold pressed" on the label and pay the price for the extra labor involved (most Hain-brand oils, for example, are cold pressed.)

On before the now common practice of implanting stents

Oh doncha know, on cardiac-related stents, part of "best medical care in the world"? NOT. Just the current fad, that even ex-presidents are still falling for. Because they happened to work for some people with some certain conditions, then everybody with heart risk must have one!?

Related: after recently checking out stent treatment for kidney stones on the internet for a relation, I also happened upon this news in my searches: stents seem to be a big growth business for attorneys who are in the specialty of suing medical device manufacturers. It appears most of them are sucky, nobody has really invented one yet that doesn't have lots of complications.

And on artery clogging, from my reading from sources I trust, for at least a couple decades now, and of course mho as idiot laywoman practicing without a license , I am betting on inflammation conditions being the main cause. (Like Mr. Smith said on a recent thread, inflammation = always bad.) Like you say, there's gotta be a reason those clog molecules attach in some and not in others. I know there is a blood test available for the arterial inflammation that many suspect is a culprit, but that they have not finished studies on it yet so nobody in the for-the-public media talks about it.

And I think statins are one of those things where they will be sorry that they gave them to so many people. Worse than stents, got too popular too fast (and they don't really understand what they do to people. ) Have learned to always be wary of something that does. Especially if doctors start taking the stuff or doing the stuff to themselves; they are prone to fads just like anyone else. If not more.

From the FDA press

EmmaZahn — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 16:44:23 +0000

In reply to Time to go overboard in the

From the FDA press release:

Further reduction in the amount of trans fat in the American diet could prevent an additional 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year – a critical step in the protection of Americans’ health.”

From the CDC, there were 597,689 deaths from diseases of the heart in 2010.

It seems almost certain that other factors are involved.

Anecdotally, my father had heart attack from a clogged artery and, yes, he was a heavy consumer of trans fat through his traditional southern diet. Afterwards, he changed his diet and took his meds then surprised his doctors a few years later when the clog disappeared and his heart healed. This was before the now common practice of implanting stents. With no idea what exactly had aided the healing, they kept him on the diet and meds. He was a very compliant patient due to my mother's vigilance. The downside to this story is that he developed iatrogenic parkinsons and that is what he ultimately died from.

I guess my point in relating this is that it might be more helpful long-term to figure out what causes trans fat to accumulate and how to prevent it and/or dissolve it. I doubt banning it from processed foods will work. More likely we will get a new improved version that a couple of decades from now will once again be targeted for elimination because in solving one problem another was created.

Do they really think people are going to give up their flaky pie crusts and buttercream frostings -- or their croinuts (or is it croinuts?)

7 Foods That Won’t Be the Same If Trans Fats Are Banned | TIME.com

A friend of mine came up with

Verified Atheist — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 13:11:00 +0000

In reply to Pollan forgot the Crapper's

A friend of mine came up with a drug version:

Take drugs.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

Time to go overboard in the

artappraiser — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 15:38:28 +0000

In reply to Butter is bad – a myth we've been fed by the 'healthy eating' industry

Time to go overboard in the opposite direction?

F.D.A. Ruling Would Sharply Restrict Sale of Trans Fats
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, Nov. 7, 2013 9:24 AM ET
Capping decades of public health battles, the Food and Drug Administration is seeking to phase out artificial trans fats, an artery clogging substance blamed in heart disease, from the food supply.

And it is not just happening

EmmaZahn — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:44:20 +0000

In reply to Yeah. Your comment got me

And it is not just happening in medicine. This past week's The Economist main article was about the downsides of shoddy science. The introductory editorial has been at the top of its recommend list all week.

Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong | The Economist http://t.co/yhnrqCbpKU
— Emma Zahn (@EmmaZahn) October 24, 2013

I hope the Twitter link will let anyone read it. If not, it is free but registration is required. Maybe this is a good time to suggest that dagblog register there and some other sites to facilitate conversations. ;-O

I love the graph. As anyone

Verified Atheist — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:08:23 +0000

In reply to Captain Kirk

I love the graph. As anyone who has ever done any real research will tell you, the only way you get a graph like that is to invent it.

Hah! Mho, he never got any

artappraiser — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 21:48:15 +0000

In reply to Captain Kirk

Hah! Mho, he never got any better at choosing his endorsement deals (i.e., Priceline sucks.)

Captain Kirk

Donal — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 21:41:12 +0000

In reply to Butter is bad – a myth we've been fed by the 'healthy eating' industry

Captain Kirk disagrees:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wf717fKFE

Yeah. Your comment got me

artappraiser — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 20:37:01 +0000

In reply to There's a lot of this going

Yeah. Your comment got me thinking that someplace along the way in the recent past of training of clinical M.D.'s, they unfortunately became part of the wisdom or idiocy of that particular crowd (i.e., public health.) When one of the main roles they used to play was protection against the same for individuals, using a rational diagnosis process learned "hands on." I.E., while excess saturated fats might be shown in a study to have caused problems for some, that doesn't mean everybody, and it doesn't mean your particular patient, that an individual patient is not just another human body identical to every other human, not just a number. Eating butter may be good nutrition for some and death for some others, and somewhere inbetween for a lot of others--how did that kind of thinking disappear? What good is a medical degree if all you do is end up following the advice of the herd like everyone else that can read the latest news reports of this or that study and apply it to everyone?

In the late 80's I had to research my own medical problems without the internet. I ended up buying more than a few tomes by "alternative wholistic medicine" M.D's. More than one was saying butter is basically a good time-tested food, many can use it in moderation with no trouble, but watch out for those modern trans fats like margarine, they actually might often be responsible for a lot of what is being blamed on saturated fats. This was of course ridiculed by mainstream medicine at the time. All it was was wisdom of doctors who actually practiced a lot of medicine on a lot of actual people, all different people.

I might have to steal that.

Verified Atheist — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 20:27:42 +0000

In reply to Pollan forgot the Crapper's

I might have to steal that.