Why a low-fat diet might not be helping your heart

A Department of Heath spokesman said: The link between saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease is already well established.

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:lol:

Without actually looking at the report, I'm going to take a stab in the dark that it entirely involves people eating a high-carbohydrate diet, and therefore is completely irrelevant to those of us who restrict our carbohydrates...

Again we have the myth of low cholesterol totals are always better. From the 2011 Norwegian HUNT 2 study. A study involving over fifty thousand people aged between 20 and 74 over a 10 year period so not something to be easily dismissed.

The full research doc can be seen here http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2753.2011.01767.x/pdf

The key chart is this one.



Shows the risk of dying associated with different total cholesterol levels.

For men (blue line) it shows to minimise risk you should aim for a total cholesterol level of around 5.5. Importantly values less than 5.5 increase your risk of dying as do values above 5.5 (a u-shaped curve). It implies the "you're diabetic so be below 4" is actually increasing your risk of dying.

For women (red line) it shows risks increase on any value less than a total of 7 which probably means that no women should take statins.

I have yet to see a scientific counter argument to the results so if anyone knows of one ...

xyzzy said:

I have yet to see a scientific counter argument to the results so if anyone knows of one ...

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The counter argument is that certain terminal diseases (such as cancer) often have low-cholesterol as a symptom rather than a cause.

Not that I buy into the whole LDL-C and HDL-C myth anyway - both just tell you how much cholesterol you have in your blood, not about the size of the particles. Small LDL particles are what cause atherosclerosis of the arteries. You can measure the size of the LDL and HDL particles (LDL-P and HDL-P) but the test is too expensive for the NHS.

xyzzy said:

I have yet to see a scientific counter argument to the results so if anyone knows of one ...

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That's because as we all know; "the link between saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease is already well established." We don't need all these new fangled facts getting in the way of something that we all know...

:roll:

Why not read the actual paper? This wasn't another long term study on self reported diet and cholesterol levels and CVD
It looked at the types of fat in the plasma of those who did and didn't develop heart disease.

The editors summary describes in simple terms what was done and why.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/inf ... ed.1001255
There is an important caveat in that the fats in a person's plasma may not reflect a dietary intake of the same fats. That's one of the areas that is still very much under investigation

These results indicate that high plasma phospholipid SFA and low PUFA (predominantly n-6 FAs) are associated with increased CHD risk but neither can be considered in isolation. It is beyond the remit of the current study to quantify in absolute amounts the relationship between blood FA concentrations and dietary intake of foods and nutrients, It is not clear how far the associations reflect complex interactions between dietary fat intake per se and FA metabolism, which may have both genetic and other exogenous influences

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phoenix said:

Why not read the actual paper?

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Because I'm at work? I'll read it when I get home...

Very interesting though - especially since we know that a high-carbohydrate diet is responsible for raising the amount of saturated fat in blood serum:

King et al (1) present very intriguing fatty acid profiles from the serum lipids of subjects fed varying amounts of carbohydrate. One of the many points of interest is the elevation in myristic acid (14:0), palmitic acid (16:0), and total saturates in the phospholipids (PLs) and cholesteryl ester (CE) fractions in response to a low-fat (17% of energy), high-carbohydrate diet.

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http://www.ajcn.org/content/84/2/461.1.full
"The low fat paradox—do dietary carbohydrates increase circulating saturated fatty acids?"