I wasn’t aware of the new debate over saturated fats, I’m curious and will be watching this evolve with interest.
That said, for me this publication has red flags right from the start. Complaining about difficulty of changing everyone’s minds is a political and non-academic persuasion tactic that does not convince me. Calling it “resistance” and “bias” is a bullshit framing that makes me less likely to trust Teicholz. Of course there is resistance to 50 years of publication and research, and there should be. There’s a lot of bias towards the earth being round, and a lot of resistance to the idea that it’s flat, right? If I repeat the claim that the earth is round, is that “propaganda”? It would indeed take time and effort to change everyone’s minds about that.
Multiple times she references “>20” papers that back up her claims. Except 5 of her references in this paper are her own. And she has around 10 on this subject. So is she claiming this “new consensus” is based on what she herself and maybe one or two other people believe? If 50% of the evidence for consensus is her own papers, then I doubt there’s any consensus at all. It’s funny to claim there’s consensus at the same time she complains that it’s difficult to change the consensus. Even 20 independent scientific papers not authored by Teicholz is practically nothing in the big picture. It will take many more papers and much more time, and the evidence needs to be overwhelming, clear, obvious, and true.
She might be right! But Nina Teicholz is a journalist, not a scientist. She does have a PhD, but her publications don’t appear to be scientific research, and most look like opinion pieces.
Out of curiosity, if saturated fats aren’t the culprit, what is? Looks like she does have one paper questioning sugar, so is she claiming sugar is the real cause? What if it’s the combination of sugar and saturated fats? Does that make her right or wrong?
It's amazing how many HNers link this charlatan's op-ed thinking it's evidence. Presumably you don't like linking to our best human outcome research on the subject because it never pans out well for saturated fat–not for atherosclerosis, not for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, not for glucose sensitivity, and so on.
So you link to the equivalent of a reddit post 'summarizing' the space. I see this link every week on here and every time, the person who linked it thinks they just had a mic drop moment like you.
I think discussing this topic with too much fervor is a waste of energy. Nutrition science is hard because performing valid studies at large scale is close to impossible, so I’m left performing an argument from nature, being that eating things that were invented decades ago might be worse for us than things we’ve eaten for millions of years.
Not everything on PubMed weights the same. As others have said, this is just a summary article by the Best seller author Nina Teicholz. Not only she's heavily sponsored by the Meat Industry (and I'm not vegan), but her best selling book title is "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet", yet in the article she declares "The author receives modest royalties on a book on the history of dietary fat recommendations and otherwise declares no conflicts of interest"...
Remarkable how easy it is to cling to propaganda