I don't read blogs or HuffPo, I try to find the research, and I find plenty of - if-not-conflicting - difficult to fully reconcile evidence. My wife is a pediatrician who tries to keep up with this stuff, and she would disagree with you as well. I'm not just talking about diet comparisons alone, I'm talking about the merits and dangers of individual foods and food types. There's a lot of research, not all of it saying the same thing. It's not easy to parse all of the caveats, confounding factors, and unique populations.
> I challenge you to post some actual links to articles here which advocate a high-fat or low-carb diet.
Here's one [1], [2]. Your criticism of [1] will be "low sample size", which is fair. But then most studies with large sample sizes are retrospective, which is the other major criticism. Your criticism of [2] will be the population type, which is also fair.
> You can't eat cholesterol-laden meals without also consuming vast amounts of saturated fat, for instance.
There's much said about the evil of saturated fat, and some of it is clearly true such as a link to heart disease (or is it? suggests one of many not-hard-to-find conflicting sources [3]; [4]) other evils are less clear. Much early criticism at it was given because it was thought to increase cholesterol, which isn't the case for most individuals; when cholesterol is impacted, it's primarily impacting the HDL:LDL ratio (or alternatively, Total:HDL).
This study [5] suggests little difference in saturated vs. other types of fat, though it relied on self-reporting. The story is more nuanced, as [6] suggests, with some clear influence on some things and mixed results elsewhere. [7] is interesting though as it indicates a link between saturated fat and heart disease, but suggests replacing saturated fat with carbs slightly increases that risk.
> Whatever nit-picked understanding you have of how cholesterol works in the human physiology will not refute this fact.
It's hardly fair to deride someone for accurately pointing out the small connection between dietary and bodily cholesterol. That's not a nit-picked understanding, it's something worth knowing.
> But what you've done by feeling satiated is miss out on nutritionally-dense foods and replace them with poor quality foods which just fill you up.
I'm not the OP, but it's certainly not one or the other for me. I eat high-fat foods (dairy, nuts, legumes, olive oil, eggs), and nutritionally dense foods (leafy greens, root vegetables). I don't disagree with your conclusions in general, but do think it is a bit over-dismissive.
Thanks for taking the time to provide those citations.
1 - This study has a tiny sample size of 9 sedentary, slightly overweight people and did not seek out to exonerate a low-carb, high-fat diet. Rather, it compared a paleolithic-type diet (30% of calories from proteins, 32% from fat (mainly unsaturated) and 38% from carbohydrates.) to SAD - the standard American diet - not exactly a high standard to beat.
2 - It's clearly written right in the study: "results of this study do not address the occurrence of rare adverse events, nor can they be extrapolated to all patients seen in general clinical practice." Again, an n=13 sample size is just insignificant. Let's bring out some meta-analyses and systematic reviews, not case reports and case-crossover studies.
3 - I am familiar with this Patty Siri-Tarino et al. paper - it gets cited all the time by fat apologists. I don't have time to go into all the details, but you can watch this short presentation pointing out its faults - https://www.youtube.com/embed/a-Tx9dCbv-g. Let's also not forget Patty works with/for the animal agriculture shill Ronald Krauss - a guy who gets massive paychecks from the beef industry, Monsanto and Coca Cola to downplay the risks of unhealthy food.
4 - "Assuming that the inverse association between SFA and stroke mortality is causal, it would nevertheless be inappropriate to recommend an increased consumption of SFA-containing products to the general Japanese population, because it might increase population levels of total cholesterol and the risk of IHD"
5 - Read the article replies. Here is one from Frank Sacks of Harvard: "The meta-analysis of dietary fatty acids and risk of coronary heart disease by Chowdhury et al. contains multiple errors and omissions, and the conclusions are seriously misleading [and should be disregarded]." Uh oh!
6 - Wow, this one is quite brazen. "Nutrition Impact is a small consulting firm that specializes in helping food & beverage companies develop and communicate aggressive, science-based claims about their products and services." Still, the only reasonable conclusion they were able to squeeze out was: "Thus, policies that prioritize the reduction of SFA [saturated fat] consumption without specifically considering the replacement nutrient may have little or no effects on disease risk, especially as the most common replacement in populations is often CHO [carbohydrate]." Sure, replacing saturated fat with straight table sugar is probably not a good idea, this is a no-brainer and doesn't lead me to the conclusion low-carb, high-fat diets are superior in any way.
7 - "This study suggests that to prevent CHD, SFA intake should be replaced with PUFA intake rather than MUFA or carbohydrate intake. However, the effects of substitution of carbohydrates may vary depending on the quality of the carbohydrates consumed. [...] In this study, only type of fat, not type of carbohydrates, was considered" Well, isn't that convenient! Let's lump all carbohydrate-rich foods into one category! No way that'll bias the results!
> I don't disagree with your conclusions in general, but do think it is a bit over-dismissive.
You're right and I apologise. I'll try to do better next time. Obviously, this is a topic I feel very heated about.
Like I said, I don't disagree with you. But I was able to string that comment together in all of four minutes. While doing so, I wasn't wading in too deep: these were near top-level results, not things I found after tossing out a preponderance of conflicting research.
Unfortunately, I've found that these things are actually difficult to really research without knowing how to search for them. My wife's got the better documentation to the information, and much more increased access to full-text. For what it's worth, her advice is: "If you need a named diet to follow, make it the Mediterranean Diet. Otherwise, go light on the red meat, avoid food where sugar/honey/HFCS is one of the first five ingredients, and eat more plants."
I don't read blogs or HuffPo, I try to find the research, and I find plenty of - if-not-conflicting - difficult to fully reconcile evidence. My wife is a pediatrician who tries to keep up with this stuff, and she would disagree with you as well. I'm not just talking about diet comparisons alone, I'm talking about the merits and dangers of individual foods and food types. There's a lot of research, not all of it saying the same thing. It's not easy to parse all of the caveats, confounding factors, and unique populations.
> I challenge you to post some actual links to articles here which advocate a high-fat or low-carb diet.
Here's one [1], [2]. Your criticism of [1] will be "low sample size", which is fair. But then most studies with large sample sizes are retrospective, which is the other major criticism. Your criticism of [2] will be the population type, which is also fair.
> You can't eat cholesterol-laden meals without also consuming vast amounts of saturated fat, for instance.
There's much said about the evil of saturated fat, and some of it is clearly true such as a link to heart disease (or is it? suggests one of many not-hard-to-find conflicting sources [3]; [4]) other evils are less clear. Much early criticism at it was given because it was thought to increase cholesterol, which isn't the case for most individuals; when cholesterol is impacted, it's primarily impacting the HDL:LDL ratio (or alternatively, Total:HDL).
This study [5] suggests little difference in saturated vs. other types of fat, though it relied on self-reporting. The story is more nuanced, as [6] suggests, with some clear influence on some things and mixed results elsewhere. [7] is interesting though as it indicates a link between saturated fat and heart disease, but suggests replacing saturated fat with carbs slightly increases that risk.
> Whatever nit-picked understanding you have of how cholesterol works in the human physiology will not refute this fact.
It's hardly fair to deride someone for accurately pointing out the small connection between dietary and bodily cholesterol. That's not a nit-picked understanding, it's something worth knowing.
> But what you've done by feeling satiated is miss out on nutritionally-dense foods and replace them with poor quality foods which just fill you up.
I'm not the OP, but it's certainly not one or the other for me. I eat high-fat foods (dairy, nuts, legumes, olive oil, eggs), and nutritionally dense foods (leafy greens, root vegetables). I don't disagree with your conclusions in general, but do think it is a bit over-dismissive.
--
[1] http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v63/n8/full/ejcn20094a.ht...
[2] (PDF WARNING) http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1475-2840-8-35.pdf
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648?dopt=AbstractPlu...
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20685950?dopt=AbstractPlu...
[5] http://annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M13-1788&an_fo_ed
[6] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11745-010-3393-4/f...
[7] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/89/5/1425.abstract?ijkey=9...